psw

I'm not sure what you mean by the wilkinson rollers...these things were designed by wilkinson I believe. I know there are a bunch of different roller kinds of things...I've even tried to make my own. I am building an LP with khaler and came up with all kinds of plans that might work with this format, but in the end the locking nut, even though I don't particularly like this format, is the most practical solution. Such heavy strings are tricky with trems generally. If the current pods you have done are working, well I'd stick to it. Maybe carefully neaten up the slot with a file, perhaps mask the slots and roller parst and paint the thing if you are going black...this could disguise the slot anyway. Looking at my LSR, I can see that the slot could be cut easier and so neater than this older version...but I am not sure that the G strings wouldn't sit a little proud or pop out or something...it would be a tricky one. If into fairly extreme trem thing, I'd be looking into a locking nut scenario. But if this is working, I'd keep it than have to modify yet a new one.

The new LSR's are smaller but come with a plastic adapter to suit these older styles. They also have these dampening pads behind the ball rollers btw, not that bar behind to maintain pressure that the old ones had. I use a 10-42 stand gauge string with unwound third and they work great, but I seriously doubt they would be suitable with a wound g like that. I'd anticipate some eating away at the dampening pad perhaps and with the tiny balls that are used, a mod like you have done is probably out of the question. Is there any reason that you seek to replace this one that you have modded? I believe you can get spares for them like the rollers if the thing is starting to wear out.

Interesting col I didn't just try ceramic, neodymium didn't work out to well, don't recall if i tryied alnico I did have remarkable success with the newer wafer coils sitting on the top edge of alnico and similar strat pickups...these are only 1mm thick...so there is not much coil around a core itself...but you seem to have that prognosis correct with what I experienced perhaps Induction unfortunately is still not a possible measurement with my tools. I have followed a thread on inductance meters and they are to costly for me to justify and the reported errors in the cheaper models seem substantial...so, alas, measuring actual inductance may be difficult for me. I am a bit fuzzy with the flu this early morning, but is it high permeability that you want. Retention of the magnetic field as the drivers coil goes through it's AC cycle is cited to be a cause of lag, lower efficiency of the device through phase difference. There are a lot of potential problems with the whole Hex driver scenario. One that I encountered quite a bit was separation of the magnetic and driver elements of the device. Regardless of strategies I employed, the driver elements did interact and often in peculiar ways depending on the kinds of strategies employed. For instance, that "2D thing" is very close to the kind of thing I extensively used with the "balanced field" idea. The driver elements still interacted with one another. That whole "system" is pretty extensive, and good luck with it, but I am not sure what it is actually trying to achieve. My perspective has always been that there is no "ultimate" sustainer. I really am not persopnally that fussed that the sustainer sounds different from a conventionally plucked string...in a lot of ways that is the point. I think, and especially when you start getting into the whole DSP thing, that you may as well use digital sample and hold technology to sustain a sound. I have heard some of Roland's high end guitar synth and processing units demoed with fenders V guitar that does exactly that...it even has light beam control interfaces...so you can sustain a note potentially or manipulate it various ways (pitch, modulation, etc) with the wave of a hand, or indeed the headstock! Plus, you can even have that play while you play something else...so combining looping and sustaining kinds of things. It sounds exactly like the guitar of course, for that's what it is a high end digital sample of what is being played. For the more organic things that general DIY'ers are able to contemplate and complete, this kind of thing is perhaps beyond reasonable possibilities. I know that I fell deeply into the 'trap' with the hex drivers that I made elusively for over a year, because I anticipated a lot of problems or solutions to perceived problems before I had gotten beyond the more basic things other than successfully running a single string from a miniture driver (about page 2 of the massive thread). I then extrapolated that I would need just 6 of these to get real polyphonic response and other such boons for the thing. They quickly developed in complexity as such basic coils will interact in so many ways, many that were not anticipated. We all know and accept (I hope) that a driver will induce a signal in a nearby coil like a pickup next to it in much the same way a transformer works. Now, why would it not be the same with driver coils all right up next to each other with a maximum gap of perhaps 10mm between strings? This is I believe the crux of the problem with Hex drivers. Not that I am not saying that there may be benefits from such a pursuit, but are those benefits worth it and such basic problems physically surmountable. ... For the more down to earth approaches that the OP al.s asks. As always there seem to be a lot left out of the questions. What is the intention of such a design. Is the use of neo-mags to make things more compact or because they are cheap and easily obtainable, or that the tag "rare earth" has some exotic appeal... The end result of the magnets is to create a magnetic field of a suitable quality that works. Last time I tried it was on the first test for a compact driver on my tele...similar to what's on it but with a core of 3mm rare earth discs...way too strong an attraction to the strings. The time before that was on a bass guitar...using the old hex driver ideas, I made 4 drivers mounted at the bridge with 8 very strong neomags to either side of the strings...interesting but I did not pursue it to far, in part at least because of my sudden move (a process I am in the middle of this week in fact). These hex things though are not like conventional drivers, a simple coil around a magnet...I honestly ran out of ways I could ever get them to be truly separated. Maybe you will have more luck and innovation in that regard. The finger mounted thing reminds me a lot of the nano-ebow thing I made (mentioned in the thread a few times)...taking the ultra-miniture hex drivers and using another to use as a 'pickup'...you can get these things very tiny...unfortunately the circuit was as big as you might expect...not finger sized. So, I had this idea of doing much the same, taking a line out from the pickup and a sustainer amp circuit...really going back to the original single string driver tests from the start and the hex things. But then are you going to really want a wire going to the driver. I think that mic stand mounted device is a better way of creating something like this perhaps and a bit more practical in performance. ... Otherwise, I don't mind that the typical sustainer drives the string differently from "natural vibration"...as col says, a lot of that stuff in the attack is the character of a guitar note...if you are going to hold that note long after that initial attack, then do you really want a it to lack the character. I mean, these things ultimately should sound musical and musically useful. That a violin bow sounds differnt from a plucked string on the same instrument has never been an issue, why should one think or aspire to such things with these magnetic ways of exciting a string. And, while the violin bow can hold a note indefinitely, the bow can provide so many other ways of controlling expressively a note of any duration. Similar things are possible with such devices as a "sustainer"...unless you aspire with great effort and technology to avoid the character that can be introduced to such an activated string in the pursuit of what is deemed "true". I ahve done some stuff with acoustics and piezos...not that keen on the sound or the musical usefulness. The old Variax thing has always been muted as having potential with this kind of thing...for the absence of magnetic pickups and for those so far into modeling. But again, for the organic qualities that a typcial sustainer can offer over the digital sample and loop things that are so much easier and actually does produce the sounds some apparently aspire to. Adding any other magnetic pickups to such a guitar in addition can cause problems could interfere with or prohibit their use. These proposals always sound so familiar, but while put forward for a few years now, nothing seems to have come of them at all except simple devices, even when those intentions were explicitly stated. But, good luck, perhaps you will have something of a first behind the mysterious Moog guitar and show how it can be a musically useful device, not just a technical accomplishment.

#1 No...separate pole pieces work fairly well...if very compact a driver there is only going to be so much 'core' and a fair amount of air that might effect things with performance. There is little problem with SC drivers anyway with single poles, the effective magnetic field is kind of combined anyway...the magnetic field is not independent...so there is little problem with bending string in mine anyway. #2 I did some like this with bolts as poles, but it didn't seem to make that much of a difference compared to other strategies (like giving the circuit a bit more of a treble bias for instance). It isn't as big a "problem" as people might think...similar with pickups, it doesn't alter things that much compared to the qualities of the overall qualities of the device. #3 I used rare earth magnets extensively, they can work, all my hex drivers had many rare earth magnetis in it...but my experience is NO. These things are powerful and the field very compact (the pole on top is heavily attracted to that below) and can seriously effect the strings vibration adversely (very easy to get "strat-itis". An equivalent strength for a single alnico fender sided pole in neodymium gets you a magnet of about a 3mmx3mm disc...so seriously small, but all the energy is very different. So...my opinion is that with conventional use, rare earth is not a good option...a few people besides me have tried them without a lot of success. I did stick a row of neo-discs to a 3mm blade at one point (to make compact) but a bar of ceramic on the same coil seemed to work a bit better. There are pics of things by me and tim from memory that show these kinds of things... That is not to say they can't be used in some innovative ways. Perhaps between dual blades and of course I made arrays of them to counteract pull in the Hex designs...the so called "balanced field"...again material in the original thread. #4 Not sure what you are are looking at there. An air gap between the core and magnets has been used in pickups ("air" pickups) but I don't know that this is an advantageous strategy. But your experience or specific use may vary. Mainly with strong neodymium magnets, I have had problems with this very compact field...even connected to a core or poles (like bolts or whatever) there is a very strong attraction to the opposite pole which is typically very close and so the field has less influence on the strings themselves. If too close, they pull on the things...if used alone, there is very little but air in the coil that affects inductance and so effectiveness. They use them in the pickups by the "animal magnetism guy"...forget their name...but these use a lot of adjustable poles and sideways neo.mags and such. They are not a 'miracle' pickup really. Although there is some use of neo-mags in pickups, they are not that great except in special applications (field shaping in SCn and fender noiseless for instance). However, despite they having a space and cost saving, these things have not proved to be a great choice in conventional designs and I think there are reasons for this. Col is right that you can use the magnet in the core, I have, but I have found there is a lack of choice or machining ability with these things. Some have cut down alnico fender poles for instance. Tim was able to machine a ceramic. For some reason, I have found that internal magnet cores are not as good as similar things with external magnets. It does not need to be a very strong field. My tele's is not that strong but I suspect it does benefit from being quite close to the neck pickups magnetic field at that portion of the string. Getting the magnetic strength right, I use a conventional pickups kind of strength as a guide. I suspect that with some dual coil designs, such as a rail or HB format, you could use a bit more strength. On single coils, it is very susceptible to strong fields...so it is very important to go too far here. With neo's it is so easy to misjudge this strength and to get effects from teh sheer compactness of the magnetic field. These kind of things were observed in real life experiemnts and in modeling with FEMM. I think some of these FEMM models may be posted using neo's and other types of magnetic material.

You have given no details about the pickup... It sounds perhaps like a poorly potted or cheap pickup...the windings in the coil can vibrate at higher volumes or resonate creating it's own signals perhaps. Have you heard this pickup in a guitar working before? Other culprits can be the way the thing is mounted so that it could be vibrating...there are ways of dampening things down but it's hard to know what you are dealing with. If mounting on an acoustic for instance, the top will vibrate and so too the pickup mounted on it and can cause such problems... I'm not sure of the value of the pots either, but if you have a high value (rather than say 250K ohms that say a fender would use typically) then you will be getting increased treble where this kind of thing hides...just a few thoughts... "Strat-itis" particularly affects real fender style pickups with the magnets as the poles...but any single coil can produce these things if adjusted too close. The magnets pull on the strings in a narrow area that could be a harmonic and so dampen vibration modes at certain frets...plus, it can in fact pull the strings out of tune. post some more details, even pics, maybe that will give some clues...

Hey there...the diagram looks ok but is missing the ground to bridge connection that can result in some noise... But...killing post...a hazard... Most make the mistake of trying to solder to the plain pot shell without any prp at all. These htings are machined and often have a residue of lube from making them or a coating or oxidization on it that resists soldering... Simple solution...before soldering...get a file and file to a bit of shiny bare metal on the edge of the pot (away from the contacts is best and don't get filings inside them . Then immediately, use rosin corred solder to "tin them" at that point...so make a nice solder bead where the filing is, you should find that it flows pretty well, it will take a bit more heat than ordinary wires. Now...strip the wire and "tin" them to...get a nice solder coating for the join on the bare wire. Again, these wires need to be clean, so it's good to strip the wire, give it a bit of a twist of the strands and "tin" them immediately with just enough heat and time to get the job done... If using bare stiff wire, again, a bit of sand paper will get the corrosion off...copper oxidises pretty fast...the solder will protect it ready for the join... Only then...do you join the wire to the join...effectively all you have to do with these "tinned joins" is melt the tinned solder together...so you don't need to heat up the parts so much again, as the solder at the joins themselves that you have already prepared...the result is that they should just easily flow together and you will get a perfect join every time. If you skip this "good practice" you may be successful, but you may find that the insulated wires melt, the joins are suspect or over heated and the whole thing gets frustrating! This procedure applies to anything...circuit boards corrode/oxidize (look dull)...so a gentle swipe or two with some wet and dry light paper will bring them up to ready...old wires, better to cut off the daggy end and re-strip a little than just rejoin (shielded cable especially needs this as if it is corroded you might use more heat and burn through the insulation causing a short...clean wires attended to immediately is the key. Hope that helps anyone with these kinds of soldering questions...if unfamiliar with soldering, there is a bit of skill in it...so practice on a few wires or something is the key...but it is not really "that hard" especially if you follow these kinds of techniques and don't treat the stuff as if glue! Oh...yeah, looking after the tip is important...again, prepare, clean and re-tin the tip always at the end and frequently in use...this will protect it with a layer of solder. Also, you do not need a big iron to do these things, even pots...small is definitely better. I now use a soldering station with soldering pencil and small tip...a bit of a cheat as it is thermostatically controlled and very light...but I have used bargain basement little irons with just as much success...it's just trickier to tell how hot it really is. One way is to have some test wires or pots about and test on them first, just before your join. A wet sponge can cool the tip down with a little "hiss" or indicate to the experienced how hot it is...you may well have to turn these things off for a bit from time to time and re-heat...without a thermostat it will just get hotter and hotter!

Interesting idea, not sure the ultimate practicality of it. This has been done a few times and I know there are a few patents about as well that you could look up to get ideas...none have been commercially successful. I think Dan Armstrong has something as well as the sliding pickup idea and other oddities...but there have been a few others. It reminds me of a similar idea they had with cars that I thought would be great...interchangeable bodies on a complete chassis...a pickup, a convertible, a station wagon...just bolt on the style of choice for the day...again didn't catch on because it was soon realized that you would have all these car bodies floating around. I suspect the difference in sound would be minimal from changing the body, but the pickups can make a big difference. People have proposed sticking pickup modules in from behind into a standard body shape as well in various ways...again, never quite made it commercially. I think the Mason guitar, whatever it is called, with the side pods might be something up your alley john and may have featured something like this and some unusual VT and switch placements... Still it is a challenge... ... What you propose seems ok, a standard jack after the selector would work, you would have to have pickups and such that use the same value pots of course. You might consider putting the switch in the body and so you could use a stereo plug for two pickups ok. But there are heaps of connectors about, some just clip together to make connections with standard wires...you may consider as a prototype for instance, recycling some stuff out of computers, like those power supply connectors or various others...you don't really need that many connections between the pickups and the body. I've used things from time to time in various guitars...I found for instance that it has been useful on an old strat that I did sustainer stuff on, to be able to slide out the scratchplate to work on things...so I had a simple connector in there to the jack socket typical of a powersupply plug, a bit smaller than a standard jack...a mini jack would be easier for that matter...but there are millions of options...good luck

I don't see any battery or preamp...this is going to be a fundamental flaw as the mismatch between the piezo pickup and the magnetic pickup and normal guitar amps are going to load tings down a lot and make for all kinds of problems. A tone circuit of resistors and caps is passive, so there is no gain there. Not familiar with it, but in a stompbox there is an active circuit that can make such tone networks effective and might be effective with a preamp in this design, but taken on it's own without a battery powered circuit, probably not. Remember, passive circuits can cancel frequencies, not boost them. I have not checked the wiring, for these reasons, no sound at all would imply a short of some kind...check the logic, better yet, test each system completely interdependently and as you wire so you can find the problem as it occurs. Good luck...I have a project that uses something like this, an LP with Khaler with piezo under the bridge to add the magnetic pickups. The plan is to use a basic preamp and activate it with a push pull switch and single volume control to fade it into the magnetic sound. Mixing mags and piezos can work, but always require at least some preamp on the piezo and for best results a proper mixing circuit in the guitar. I have done them with piezos in the neck pocket of strats, they can be sensitive to handling noise, but even with a very basic preamp sound surprisingly good.

Thanks for the reply Fredric That was the assumption I think, but really choices of pickups are very personal and blanket statements like they are unqualifiably better than something else is bad publicity for all concerned, especially the OP. These kinds of comments always bring about suspicion and questions about validating the claims. Similarly the builder of the pickups seems to be afflicted with this same thing...I got some bobbins and magnets and wound some pickups...and sound came out! Really, as SL was suggesting and most know, it takes years to really get a handle on designing and predicting pickup qualities, not just that they work. The ambitions of the maker seem very much to be in there infancy and is displayed in the hype without substance blogs that I read. The suggestion by the OP was that he made the guitar for someone else...he also uses a well know name associated with Ibanez copies and in looking it up, you get a scam site as an alternative. All these things really should be considered I think, even by newbies before they start putting themselves out as guitar builders and naming themselves as such. It's worth a simple google check just to be sure a tleast...my name in Australia is synonymous with "primary school wear" as it turns out and so the initials seem to be pretty well known to jus about any parent...ahhaha!

No...I realize that I was being patronizing with the playdoh stuff, but I hope that the OP will at least look at the linked tutorials and stuff that I provided initially and the information provided and do a little study and get to grips as to why things like a buffer is important, potting is vital, and the drive design is important. Being able to read the resistance of the coil is pretty basic stuff, most of these things are well covered with photos for instance. The last person posting recently, used pickup wire and asked whether when it breaks it could just be tied together. I am not saying that the information is too difficult or technical at all...I am saying study the information presented and base at least the core principles on that understanding...so clearly potting has always been paramount, there is a reason for the wire and resistance formula, there is a reason for the buffer...and this information was given here and over and over before. These threads do go a little off topic. I don't think going dual coiled at this stage for the OP is particularly a good idea, we all go off into side topics since everything got closed down...it's a shame, but that's the way PG wants it. I may start again elsewhere or reactivate things on other sites if I do much new work, but PG has traditionally been the home of this thing. ... No...humbucking pickups work but are well known to get the full power of them close to the strings, pulling them back dramatically reduces the effectiveness of them. My LP, when tested with a driver and so lowered the neck pickup 3mm, hardly produced much output at all. Strat pickups conversely cause trouble if they get close to the strings and will work a surprising distance from the strings. I know that plenty of single coil pickups pack a lot of output out enough to break up a bit without boosters...there are plenty of classic rockers that used them without booster and got that kind of sound. Of course if these pickups are the source sound, then that same potential break up is going to dirty up the sustainer circuit, so a bit of warmth in the fetzer seems mild compared to a super hot HB. The reality is that there is a margin of tolerance that can still get good clean results. So...what my concern is that these things may need to be very close to get the AC pulse working on the strings themselves and that the shape of the magnetic field is more contained...this is part of why they can be so quiet as well as the RWRP aspects, the things are very localized. They can produce far more power not because they are HB, but because there is twice the room on those bobbins as a single coil has to turn wire around, they are not twice as loud however. Their characteristics are also very different and not necessarily advantageous to a driver. But some of this is conjecture, but some of it is experience...but then I can only test the ones I have made side by side with alternate designs...my dual core blade for instance beside a compact single. If your dual coil original driver or FF's there or others (like the commercial units), I don't know that I see any massive improvements in the region of 40%. This would surely be a boon, but simply have not seen it in my own work or really in others...but I am keen to see it "proved" For instance, I was under the impression that you had initially made a single coil driver similar to those suggested, and then chose to go on to the dual coil designs you favored. Did you get a massive boost in performance in comparing the two. My reservations are based on my own real world experiments, but admittedly there are quite different beasts in many respects, I certainly experienced that close bladed drivers seemed to need to be very, very close to the strings and did not provide any more EMF than the single coil designs. In Bi-Lateral designs, there did seem to be a bit of a dead spot between the coils...in some therefore I overlapped the coils in the centre like a z-coil. But there is nothing wrong with the Dual coil designs or other ideas at all, it all depends on the results you are aiming to get to. As I can make single coil drivers compact and meeting the criteria I set, and not have excessive problems with EMI, that is still my preference and the suggested starting point for getting into the project.

True...you are probably right there paul! There are particular problems with DIY sustainers often because unlike fernandes units, when the deice is switched off, so is the power and there's a bit of pickup bypassing and such...the fernandes and other units need a battery to be there at all times...so like most pedals too, the power is only ever off when the lead is pulled. Good point about battery drain as well, be sure you can get to the batteries easy enough, I suspect on this project a fair bit of guitar is going to be cut out of it, so that won't be a problem I suspect.

Hmmm...hopefully the connecting of separate power supplies together like this won't give you a pathway for them to interact...things like switch pops and things can so easily be transplanted through a common ground say as these devices are switched in an out. Sustainers frequently ahve issues with this and the fernandes systems have circuitry to deal with them, but with an onboard distortion...there might be issues, hard to say till you try. Perhaps some preliminary testing. You can get switch jack sockets that have separate switching to the ground when a jack is inserted...possibly separate switches, so that might help avoid problems. I suppose there wouldn't be too much more problems than you'd find with the distortion outside the guitar, only way to tell is to try it and see. Good luck with it though.

Sorry...i didn't mean your calculations are wrong, but when translated into a device with all the other elements, you may not get that much more efficiency. But any more efficiency is a good thing, less power required means less EMI along with the dual coil design to contain it, plus far easier to get more clean headroom and run off a battery for longer, etc. So, well worth pursuing. For me though, without extensive modifications or doing the kind of thing the commercial guys do, such a driver kind of negates the neck pickup or low mod aspirations I have...but that isn't what everyone wants of course. I look forward to seeing the results. My reservations are that where you get two opposing magnetic fields, the shape seems to be contained a lot between the two blades, closer it gets more contained. As a result, it seems that the influence of the forces seem to be more between the blades than above them...but I could be wrong. A bit early in the morning here and a while since I was building them. ... Maybe, but every indication is that there has been little research or knowledge yet about the requirements of such an undertaking...if the basics are not down (potting coils, reading resistance, buffering the amp...even with all the information out there on these things), then more technical information may indeed not help things...well, I think that is not that unreasonable to surmise...but we may already have scared him off...or perhaps the OP is busy getting a handle on these things and exploring options as I hope. ... There certainly is a lot more that can be done in the area of the driver. Well, circuitry too if one has a mind to design things for the response they want or tailor it to a specific drivers qualities. But it is good to see more innovation into alternatives. The single coil driver is not necessarily "the best"...one must assume that these simple options must surely have been explored on the way to making the various commercial versions about. They can work surprisingly well though and various dual coil options significantly more technically challenging, at least for me. In the end, I didn't see a big pay off, but maybe I was doing it wrong. Moving the blades closer seemed to make things like "throw" a little worse, you needed to get the things very close to the strings. I did make at least one bi-lateral compact driver which was an "interesting" experiment but didn't work quite as hoped either. ... Still I am conscious that this is all a bit off topic as always seems to happen, so apologies. I have been posting elsewhere on some sustainer stuff and may well be getting back into it after this next move in a couple of weeks...I have at least one project that really needs completing and a few others guitars with special features that should be done. One thing I have noticed is that many report that their fernandes systems are very even and 'polite' for want of a better word, and that is what was judged between the sustainiac and mine in comparison. The DIY versions do have the potential for a lot of dynamic range if that's the kind of thing people are after. These aspects are often left out or not fully explored in general. Often clouded by assumptions that there is a "best" or "ultimate" device or sound. It would be good if there was more of a statement of aim with some of these devices as to what the builder is aiming for. For me, I have always liked the dynamic response that can be got from these things, I feel there is a lot of expressive potential there...others may just as validly be pursuing a constant even response that never drives the strings too hard or varies too much to the players touch. Personally, I like the more ebow like sounds that can be got with something that is very sensitive to the player, a lot more bloom, a lot of the harmonic effects. The simple devices can do this with simple circuits pretty well, and fill a lot of the other criteria I set myself. Still, there is some amazing potential really...I did a bit of brain storming the other day and thought that it would be fun to make a "stick" like tapping instrument, dampened at the nut, ad the strings driven by a driver just from tapping the thing. Perhaps in an instrument like this I would desire a more controlled and predictable even sustain that would be more forgiving of uneven hammering with different fingers. Perhaps here too, a multi-driver kind of thing, like hex systems, would be advantageous to explore as well...it's always been fun to think about the possibilities of this device.

I think one of the things that makes PG different from a lot of guitar fan sites is that it seeks to discuss real information, not just fan stuff. By necessity, you describe this product, for which there does seem some kind of personal connection (these pickups are not yet in any kind of production and the builder of them new to pickup building) as great. Not great for the price, but greater than some of the most renown and coveted but very different products out there like 'duncans n EMGs'. At PG, people expect more than this, especially if recommending a product than I bought them, I like them... Why do you like them Why do you consider them better than others How did you find this pickup maker (especially since he is not yet in production) Many of us would like to know what makes these pickups technically better than others just like them. There is nothing to suggest to me that they are "better" technically than any hand wound versions that people could wind but hype and naive hype...in my opinion. Perhaps the reason PG stays off 'fanboy' or spam or scam advertising of products is that they expect more than other sites. If products are to be recommended, there is an expectation that this recommendation or big claims be backed up by some kind of understandable information that others can make a judgment on. The sound in the clip for instance is the classic buzzy trebly 'bee in a jam tin' sound...many will ahve heard this expression and understand from it what that means. If not, listen to your clip. As I say, if maybe the recording or the amp (no details are given) or indeed you may have sought out that sound... More likely, and as is often the case, we all tend to try and find something desirable in what we buy, especially with something we have a big personal investment in. This is particularly true with guitars and especially those we build. The story changes from the initial post of these are better than 'duncans n EMG's' to... But you see...you put out there that you were experienced in a range of pickups, your sign on name implies you are some kind of builder or aspire to be one. But you built a guitar and didn't realize how much it would cost (yep, that's what we have all found)...and you got these for a cheap price. Now that's very different from being better than 'duncans n EMGs' isn't it? You found some good cheap pickups, the guy who built them for you helped with "the design' and the guy who is playing the guitar in the clips "helped you with the trickier parts'. This does sound like someone that has built a guitar for the first time and suddenly thinks he is a luthier with the experience and knowledge to make broad judgment calls on the quality of some "cheap pickups" in comparison to 'benchmark' products in the industry. Anyway, it looks like a nice playing guitar and you are happy with the tone, great...but PG does have a tendency to self-regulate against everyone who has bought a product or help a mate by making broad ill informed advertising for them. We have seen it time and again. ... Perhaps a better approach, even now, would be to say why these things are superior for you. But in the end, it does look like you were helped out with building your guitar, you bought some pickups off a guy that has himself just started making them, and you just thought you'd help out a mate with a little advertising...that's not unbiased helping people who might buy these things thinking they will get superior products cheap. ... With a little more research, I see that there are two pcb guitars...one is the guy Bunker who ghost built USA Ibanezs...the other "pbcguitars" is a scam redirection site it seems.... http://pbcguitars.com/ This "site" will show a picture of a girl and the options to choose all kinds of music related links, but when you click them, you just get more and more google adds come up...there is no pbcgutars! However, there is the brand PBC Guitars, it's even on the headstock of the things...clearly not yours. Now, I'd be thinking carefully about changing your guitar building name if you were thinking of building more guitars for others (although I was under the impression you built this for yourself, but never mind). One because you are encroaching on a USA builder of some renown who might not take kindly to that, or two you will be associated with a blatant scam-spam site to lead people astray for profit in endless google ads. Neither would forward your reputation, and neither will threads like this that smack of much the same thing. Just something you should seriously consider...especially if going to be copying ibanez guitars like the JEM for which the PCB and bunker built guitars have something of a reputation. Wouldn't want someone bying one of your guitars off of eBay say and thinking the were getting a real PCB Ibanez instead of a first time builder's (with help) instrument with cheap pickups instead and paying more for the PCB name. But you see...as others have said, PG and the net in general is full of scammers and spammers or people who don't do a google search on their own name before they pass themselves off as a guitar builder...like with a name like pcbguitars. Just eh spam site should ahve been enough for you to avoid using such a name....unless...

Whats a guy from new zealand talking in euros for? Being half new zealander myself, that's the weirdest accent in your typing ever..."theses" is certainly beinag added to my vocab, I think you might start a trend there! According to the web site, these pickups are not even on sale yet, the whole "company"...see pick below... hasn't even got any 'product' as yet but claim lots of meaningless stuff... That's not surprising for pickup makers...but look at the 'tools and components'...these are completely stock standard HB parts that everyone uses...but a multimeter is not enough to test anything but resistance. Yet the usual claims like the OP here about more 'tone and power'...but there is not even attempt to 'innovate' or show anything that might make these better than a SD or an EMG that have put in heaps of research and testing and magnet types...even better hype guys...but at least these more established guys have a proven track record and the products and what they do is well known. Comparing anything to duncans or EMG's are just silly...hugely different pickup systems, one passive the other active and both innovative with a wide range of products. but a little research, I assume you are 'paul' from new newzealand via sweden... paul from new swedenland and ordered some 'super distortions' from the guy... second customer it seems...but really, super distortions were the first of the over powered replacements that started a lot of the custom pickup trend in the 70's, things have come a long way since then...over wound and muddy and now relatively obsolete in the face of other options...and you ordered unseen a cheaper copy... but, you may well be 'real'...if so, great, glad you are happy with them, but there is nothing in your posts that tell any more than the blurb, in fact conspicuously less, or any sign that you'd know a good pickup from a bad one...of course these choices are personal. I don't know if its the audio or amp or recording...but to my ears they sound like trebly buzzy and irritating in tone...this might be the desired quality, but that video doesn't show any particularly good tone. the maker claims that most young players wouldn't know a PAF tone if they heard it, so there is no point aiming for that. But really, the major manufacturers don't base their PAF pickups on the bad ones, there is some crazy hype in that block that some PAF's were bad...of course they were, SD based his JB pickups on the great ones he heard in Jeff becks Les Paul...even his hyper site wouldn't go so low as to put their customers and products down so far as to say they wouldn't know the difference...in short, they wouldn't know a good tone form a bad one. But hey, maybe the old bee in a jam tin tone from the 70's is coming back in style...good on you!

I take your points...and you are right...just perhaps too technical for this OP to make that much use of it perhaps... if I had an inductance meter I'd gladly measure it, there are so many variations that I am sure that it will be quite a bit of variation in the various versions. But, there is a wide margin of effective driver impedances and inductances that have shown to work. My "complete system" evolved, I have stated that I used modified kits originally based on the CHAmp (an LM386 circuit pretty much identical to the Data Sheet LM386 on x200) and usually a 100uF output cap...this has been repeated often enough, but I have shown a vast number of amplification versions with different chips and variations most of which worked as well...its an amplifier. For the preamp, in the early days I also tinkered with the PreCHAmp kit, designed to match the CHAmp and used a two transistor push pull kind of thing. Tinkering allowed the control of gain for instance that varied widely over the years and in some versions allowed for variations with trim pots and such. As they were running together, some things in the powersupply could be shared. These were inside the "sustain box" and the original "sustainer strat" but were a stop gap solution on the way to developing better purpose built circuits, I anticipated with the input of people more expert in such areas, like your good self. I even tried to commision a professional at one stage, but they came up with the exact same thing that I was already using. These circuits were developed for the Mag, 'Silicon Chip' many years ago and CHAmp stands for...Cheap and Handy Amplifier...the kit is widely found and works out cheaper than the components alone. But, in kits or simple circuits, opamp versions can be made that work just as well with less components and size. These things were also used for the bulk of the Hex Drivers as well...it's just a small non-loading amp...no magic circuit system at all! The F/R is not as bad as people make out for this either, it is just missing all kinds of filters to help prevent internal oscillation at high gain, all the things in the data sheet, and these things I have specified many times to improve it. The Fetzer in the preamp...my main problems with that is not that the thing has some warmth to it, but the need to have trim pots for biasing the transistor and such make the design not the best and clunky and not the best for beginners compared to say an op-amp solution. Again, like my early 'any amp will do to start with' approach and concentrate on the driver as suggested to me by LK very early on, and proved to be sound advice. So...any amp could work if matched to the driver and pickups...some might be better than others, but I kept things simple and constant to test drivers with identical circuits and conditions and explored alternatives to work towards something more purpose built for this purpose. I really don't think the circuitry is as big a deal as people make out. I have had other reservations that I feel are true as well about my own more recent circuits...much of which I have given away in the principle and general component blocks. I was never happy, especially with the amount of scuttlebutt and posturing that started to emerge, about promoting other peoples designs like the F/R or the reaction to any design anyone proposed. I saw a lot of things both online and privately, and still do, that seek to take such circuits, lambaste them as not being "perfect", changing a few components, put down the originator, then call it their own. So, that attitude alone is enough to put me off personally. For people who do know about these things, more than enough has been said to extrapolate what I have been doing later and what designs have influenced me. One of the things that influenced my recent purpose built circuits of course was your work and ideas col. The use of AGC though known, but the discussion around types and advocating the things, got me looking at different options and making something basic of my own using the LM386...nothing as complex or elegant as yours of course, but elegant in it's simplicity. I was also influenced to cut right beack on preamp power, so that with improvements to my drivers, I found that I could scale right back to a buffer only in the preamp, where early on I sometimes used massive amounts of gain. With AGC, it will of course drop even lower when not needed, but I also found that I could run it without effective AGC for that sound at higher drive levels...creating a different kind of drive control with more range than I used to get. But, when at these kinds of levels, we are really looking at my disclosed LM386 with 100uF output cap mod and a buffer...so a very simple replicable circuit. ... hmm...maybe you mis read it, but I was clearly saying exactly that...so it is true...the core size and such make a dramatic difference, I believe the overlapping of coils do as well (hence the thin coil) and I recall you feeling that there is perhaps an optimum cross section of coil as well...maybe wrong there. There are of course other elements to the "thin coil theory" in my design philosophy and that element is contentious. But...yes, I am saying that only going by the number of turns, as the OP and others have obsessed about is no good...reading the resistance is the easiest thing with the most common of tools...and is effective to get a resistance that is in the range the circuit wants to work at. We know that 7-9 ohms will work, most of mine of the standard 3mm design work out to be on or slightly less than 8 ohms for instance. So...with the abilities and tools available and the experience to interpret them, reading the resistance of the coil with the formula provided will reap a result in the workable range and is entirely reproducible and has been done with all kinds of variations in core dimensions and such...by me and by very many others. ... Col, some really cool work on the drawing board there...yes, I have always thought the gap between the cores on dual coil drivers may cause problems. Shame, as I wanted to take the 'wafer coil' things I last built to that obvious conclusion with a fit on cover for HBs...probably would be able to get it to work though. My attempts at multi-coil devices (my hex coils were very different in every way to these ideas btw), like my mid-driver rail thing the size of a single coil...seemed to have some inherent flaws that I didn't like. The only reason that that mid driver rail thing was not successful btw way that I was ambitious in the application...putting it between two active pickups and closer to the bridge, which was the point of the exercise, was pushing things a little far...I had hoped to get something like Dizzy got with his bi-lateral design. I have not been impressed by my attempts at bi-lateral and stacked designs either...and they take a lot of work. My pursuing of the single coil is that they do seem to have more "throw" to them, working a decent distance from the string and so evening out some of the effects of action that dual coils seem to have problems with (they seem to need to be close and constant, or at least more so, distance from the strings). The reasons for pursuing them is largely, for me, was in special circumstances that required less EMI effects, like the mid driver...unless you were going to go the full hex or some other variation for better polyphonic or even response or something. If, and I seem to be able to, be able to make a single coil driver compact and meet the other criteria that I set for myself, I personally don't feel the drive to develop too far into this area. The only thing that I did have on my mind was the HB wafer coil adapter like I did for the strat pickups but for HB neck pickup guitars...but there again is a special circumstance. Once you sacrifice the neck pickup, like your own or FF has done, and many others, a lot of complexity is stripped away, especially in switching and installation and EMI problems associated with nearby coils not in use but perhaps still connected to ground and potentially introducing noise. So, if the single coil creates the effect, has more throw and is far easier to make and to make compact...I don't feel the need personally to go too far into that area. I've always felt that the more compact the driver is, the less EMI spread there is, and having the bulk of the coil as close to the strings as possible, is also advantageous. All these things are easier with a SC device and are happily in line with my global low mod ambitions in my own work that for me determine the degree of success. But the things are intriguing and could lead to more adventurous designs down the track I guess and i am always interested to see what people make of them. I'm not sure of the calculations for a 40% increase in force, I think other factors may influence things...but I can see where you are going there I suppose, more force means less power required, cleaner headroom, battery life, etc. Just not sure if other factors of parallel coils are not going to negate things a little. Certainly, my dual coil drivers seemed to be less effective, not more...and have their own problems besides more complex and perhaps bulky construction. More power of you (pun intended) if you are successful though! It does occur to me, thinking back to a lot of my dual coil designs, that the cores were radically thin to make them that compact and these may well have been a very bad strategy on my part. ... Just over viewing your posts, enamel thickness and such can make a difference, in more recent times with wire obtaining difficulties, I bought a big roll...and this had thicker enamel. But, the ability to make a very tight and neat solid coil with experience and practice, made far more difference than the insulation thickness. Two coils of 16 ohms with almost 0.2mm wire is going to be significantly bigger in every way...not sure if the increase in force isn't only going to be realized with more power...then there are other factors like the resonance of this coil structure and things. Probably will work, but like the thicker wire guys, this will give you the option of more force, but in comparison tests, they only worked with more power applied and their characteristics seemed to have problems with higher strings. I was not suggesting that wire gauge and DC resistance is all that matters...I pointed out we know nothing of the core or magnetics in this case. But when people are using playdoh and not knowing how to measure the resistance of the coil (let alone the inductance and knowing what to make of such a measurement as there is no data anywhere as to what to aim for)...of course all these other factors matter and are more important technically, but in the end, a close enough working device can consistently be made with these things as a guide. Without core dimensions and factors like the winding style (how tight, etc) turns are the most leading guide to making a successful driver...IMHO...for this kind of level of exploration and motivation. ... One of the reasons for "secret stuff'...well, it can be a complex of reasons really. I did not set out to dictate "a way" of doing these things...I set out to explore and share my explorations and in so doing, and with a lot of ongoing interest that fueled that, encourage others to help develop things further. To a large part this did occur, but far more was the call for "the system" to be made and exposed...then in recent times be criticized or co-opted or even sold as someone else's idea. This is not a new thing either, but it has happened enough...and a conclusive circuit by me I felt may well have killed a lot of exploration. The reality has always been that there are people better equipped and skilled than I am to come up with appropriate amplifier circuits, that's all that was ever required. Also, we all have different aims in response, mine have always differed from yours col, but both are valid, just different sounds and responses from the technology. I was never aiming to replicate the fernandes or other systems and I have interests beyond that of "endless sustain" that most people associate with these things. I don't have "a system" as such...well I do, but that kind of evolution gets close to commercialization. But there is no "secret" or mysticism about it except by the suspicions of others and the superstitions people have about circuits. A good non-loading amplifier circuit that can be stable at high constant loads (without shutting off for overheating, etc) that matches the driver and the input is all that was ever required. People give me too much credit even in the fostering of the "secret" conspiracies in this regard concerning circuits for what I am capable of doing I suspect. Privately col, I wouldn't mind so much with you, maybe I have already suggested to you the kind of things I use these days, I don't recall, but open forum is inappropriate in my book. The only thing that I think that some people neglect, that I have always been very open about, is that with a LM386 circuit, I find that a 100uF output cap gives a sound and response I particularly like. No secret there, this mod will make the circuit more treble biased and perhaps a little less laggy. The upside, perfect high string response and less power to drive them and a more even overall drive, the "down side", though I like it, is that in high drive in normal mode, the lower strings, and notes up to about the second C (5th fret, g string), these notes bloom to a harmonic of usually a fifth above. As I say, I like it, it will drive mainly fundamentals if drive is lowered if wanted, but then high string response wears off...but then I have a control to turn it up as well, so, why not. But then a lot of this has been often discussed, so no secret at all. More important to success seems to be installation on multi pickup guitars, but again, I seem to have done most of the work in this area and my findings and solutions have often been posted...no secret there either. The real thing is the driver to me, and there I have been more than open. The more open I am the more criticism I seem to attract...this put me right off my circuit design exposure. Now it is that I am making people use 0.2mm wire and attributing magic qualities to it and spreading needless pain on a design that does not work...patently untrue. This simple design will work, significant variations to it will provide significant variations in performance....that I regard as a failure. Saying any wire will do is far worse...not that there is something magical about the wire, just the end result. Oh...core material...no problem. It is known that typically I use ordinary 3mm steel that I bought in the hardware store for a couple of bucks and cut to size. On strat type pickups and adaptions, I use the standard alnico poles...I have tried adjustable bolts and laminated steel from computer chassis, I have used exotic ferrite materials and powdered pure iron and epoxy...all work, but the steel seems to be plenty good enough. I don't like to go much bigger for a few reasons, but I do aim to keep things compact. The blades I used were cut from fretsaw blades I think...but that was less enjoyable to do... ... Not sure if that helps with any perceived "secrets" of not...the fact that others have been able to replicate similar results shows that my secrets are not that well hidden. I can assure people that playdoh was never a secret 'ingredient' though I have made liberal use of PVC and double sided tape over the years to stick things down!

Fairto a point...my point is that these calculators are not accurate and the only way to know exactly the resistance of the coil is to measure it. Inductance is of course the important thing, but that is hard to measure and not necessary. If people go only on the number of turns, other factors like the bobbin and core size, the tightness of the coil or if they stretch the wire as they turn, can all have an influence. If you use the correct specs the DC resistance will give the required turns to make the thing work. So, the advice was meant simply to measure the coil resistance and not go through mathematical calculations or rely on calculators to predict it...or counting turns...it is just the easiest most accurate way to get the required result. As the design has been replicated with a range of cores, from my simple thin blades to pickup poles and everything in between with success, I can reasonably assume that this is less of a factor. The wire size and coil qualities, though I have not measured them nor the ability to do so with any kind of sensible and useful data, do seem to make the biggest difference. Again, my advice was in line with that. A known design, replicated with reasonably wide tolerances has shown to consistently work. That is not to say other ideas can't or won't work; I didn't try everything. I did try thinner and thicker wire to get to this design, this is what worked best as an average of factors. I did try the same wire with different cores, and unless ridiculously thin (like a 1mm core) this had far less of an impact. I say 'correct' wire size because this kind of specs in this kind of coil seems to produce the kind of inductance that can work on all the strings if built properly. By far the most failures were from failing to adhere to the basic tenants of any such device... if there are loose windings, non potted or playdoh or such...the thing will vibrate internally and fail if the pickups and circuit are loaded by not having a buffer stage...the thing will fail if you use a radically different coil specs, like 0.1mm wire in the same design...the thing will fail if you mismatch the 8ohm expected impedance a lot by extra turns...the thing will fail We have seen this time and again, and this is exactly the kind of thing that is mis-information...that people have trouble with the design. The problems only occur when people stray from the important elements of any such device. So, I apologize for any "attitude", but all of the things that would make this project and design fail have been committed. Mike-G used different wire and strong magnets on the ends only of a stainless steel core...the result was he had some success, and yet, some problems...but then, if he had stuck to the original design or discussed these things before writing a tutorial and fixed them, a lot of misinformation and controversy could have been avoided. The result is the myth that there is a problem getting high strings to sustain. So, the original proven design and failures and poor circuits like the F/R solution have been attributed to me and of the project generally...and every time a failure like this occurs, it provides mis-information about the project and ammunition for those who what to suggest that there are fundamental problems with the design. It has been a while obviously, but I am not sure that anyone that has done these things as intended has failed...certainly a lot have failed...but all I recall are through not sticking to specs, bad workmanship and following peoples own ideas about things like circuitry before getting things to work in the most basic form. The problems presented in this thread are classic examples of why people fail and not at all atypical. So, while the more technically minded may wish to debate inductance or even suggest you need elaborate winders and scopes to build these things, it is not so. Simply measuring the driver as you would a speaker so that it matches the circuit output is more than sufficient. Building a basic amplifier with an input that will accept a high impedance pickup, is more than sufficient. Building a driver that is potted in glue to prevent any internal vibration, be efficient at all frequencies and not spew all kinds of EMI, is more than sufficient information. Mis-information is when someone pops up, puts up a tutorial of basically the same design, claims that any wire is fine (then reveals he used the same wire gauge as the original), claims that it is different in the use of a different amplifier chip or buffer stage instead of the F/R which I have never used (though can work) and say there are significant differences...that's mis-information. The 0.2mm wire was arrived at to produce a coil that worked, it can be explained through inductance or turns or whatever, the end result is that this spec for this design is relatively important to achieve the result desired. You don't need to worry about the theoreticals if you stick to what works...one should not at all be surprised if almost all of the important elements are neglected if the thing 'fails'. With someone (OP) at this stage who lacks the knowledge to measure a coil even when demo-ed succinctly with photos, seems to me to be not at a stage where considering the complexities of inductance or even the mathematics of making a coil that might be the equivalent to the intended design; it is a little much to get one's head around compared to just getting a wire size that is known to work and using it as intended as I suggested. So, my comments were meant to help...the problems now of going along some of the suggested routes will likely lead to more problems along the way and into unknown territory for which the OP is ill equipped to trouble shoot. You will note for instance, that we still have no idea what core or magnets are being used, the stability of the bobbin construction...in fact we only found late in the stage that the thing is vibrating itself silly because of playdoh potting! Without sufficient full disclosure, it is impossible to answer these questions. One might assume that people are following the instructions and work from that basis, one can see where they failed to do so and see the problems that occur as a result...but really...yes number of turns is important, but this will work itself out if wound to the specs and the DC resistance is measure as I suggest. Basically...I'd be simply doing a bit of reading or even asking here what are the important parts of the design and getting a handle on that without the 'theory' and 'maths' that have been brought up. Simple things, you have a circuit, was this tested with a speaker...is it working ok? Did you use the right wire that will give the right inductance, did you pot the coil while winding, did you completely isolate pickups other than the bridge...all common advice repeated ad-infinitum because of the failures. What isn't seen here on the open forum are all the many people who did follow the advice and built the thing to spec and got immediate results. May even with the limitations of the F/R, but all that is seen are the problem ones and I really can't recall failures that didn't involve variations, different specs or poor workmanship or wishful thinking.

1# don't worry about turns, worry about getting close to 8 ohms....with the correct wire. Trying to make things equivalent to the right wire instead of getting the right wire, seems absolutely pointless and fraught with problems. 2# the "potting", the glue...is fundamental to the thing working...that's why the instructions say glue and not playdoh!!! sheeeesh! Yes, you have so many loose windings you are hearing the coil vibrate!!!! If the energy is going into this how do you expect there to be enough left over to drive the strings or for these weird signals not to get into the sensitive pickup that detects magnetic signals??? 3# the power amp like the LM386 is not built to take the high impedance pickups, so some kind of buffer is important. The fetzer was never the best choice, but it will work. Other options which all have their pluses and minuses are things like the tillman or an opamp or just any common stomp box that usually has a buffer stage in it. The fact is that you need to have this stage for this circuit and this project. If you have built a buffer and it isn't working with a proper LM386 circuit (tested with a speaker as your driver is obviously useless) then you have done something radically wrong with the circuitry too! This will not work, it is not just the tone suck on the guitar, but that this effects the amount of power you are getting out of the system too! ... There have been posts that suggest almost any wire guage will work and such, this may be true within some kind of system, but for my design, for it to work as expected, and in anyone else's working on this principle, there are standards that need to be adhered to if you expect it to work. So...absolutely no vibrations in the coil can be tolerated...no playdoh potting or anything like that. I seriously advise forgetting about formulas and theoretically if you run several strands to make the equivalent of...just get the right stuff. If you want to add a buffer stage or preamp, the fetzer will work for instance, not having that transistor is not an excuse to leave it out...there are equivalents that will work just as well that can be adapted. Otherwise, there are all kinds of kits and circuits about that describe simple buffers or preamps that will work. Before anyone starts yelling at me in bold type about it, I am not saying that my wire gauge or anything is the only one that will work, but it has been proven over and over to have struck the right balance to get the job done effectively and efficiently in this kind of simple design. At no stage did playdoh enter the equation...where did that come from! Glue, there is a step by step real time pictorial that shows exactly how easy it is to do this by hand with safe wood glue and be effective. Many have suggested that this isn't good enough and to use epoxy or something, or even let toxic superglue get everywhere...but really, if we are playing with playdoh, keep safe and use something like PVA...it only confirms why I suggested this solution in the first place. Also, have on hand tape and stuff so that you can get the coil tight. The turns thing, seems to vary a bit even with the same wire gauge, a lot depends on the size and type of core you are using for instance. I don't recall details of that either...perhaps a picture of exactly what we are dealing with would help. But there is no need for formula and suppositions or counting turns...just measure the ohms till you get to about 8 ohms and you are done...it certainly is the easiest way and most accurate approach and again, clearly showed in the tutorial... I suppose we may as well go back to basics...is there something you don't seem to be able to follow form the driver winding tutorial I wrote and photographed? It seemed pretty clear to me, but then maybe I am wrong. I certainly didn't include any playdoh or even counting of turns. Perhaps the best way to proceed is to give us a full picture of what you are doing, perhaps even pictures...but there just seems to be way too many shortcuts taken here and wondering why it doesn't work...it doesn't work because you can't take that many shortcuts with something as sensitive as this. The reason that these threads go around and around, and that the main thread got so big, was that people just keep taking short cuts or following assumptions or simply being far to naive about things. Then you end up with a bunch of people chiming in suggesting there are problems with the basic principle when in fact there are none, everyone that has replicated my basic design fundamentals has gotten reasonable to excellent results. Many have gone on to create fine variations of their own. It really is not that hard, but it does mean following instructions or at least principles...non of which includes the use of playdoh to pot a coil! sorry....had to let that out... ... sigh...I have been able to get a tone sucking circuit like an unbuffered LM386 to drive a string...perhaps most I don't recall...but the driver is a key element and you don't have one yet that could anywhere like be capable of working. However, it is a tone sucking inefficient idea not to have this part of the circuit and you will never get the results without something of that kind in the circuitry. RoG circuits are notoriously skimpy in their components, this project requires clean headroom with all manner of precautions to prevent internal circuitry oscillation at high outputs and loads...these details are in the data sheet and advisable to add in. Many judge the LM386 running at 200x amp without any of these things included which are specified by the manufacturer...hardly fair, nor the best for a project like this that places high demands on the elements of a complete system. Remember, that when a string is vibrating it is pumping a lot of continuous input and output into these things. Fortunately the LM386, for all its downfalls, can take it, but it may well not be happy about it! For alternatives to the fetzer, try the tillman or any other simple buffer, look for preamp kits...the champ and prechamp kits can easily be adapted though make for an unnecessarily large circuit, opamp circuits should work fine (may take more power to run perhaps). Your biggest problem is clearly the driver...my advice still stands, use the correct formula, magnets (remember mike G's failed in part because of the bizarre magnets used) and potting to make a solid coil...measure the resistance rather than count turns as it is near impossible to calculate without an accurate bobbin and core dimensions, the stretching and wire, etc. Those turns calculators are a guide and incredibly inaccurate...ignore them. Fortunately you now have the attention of people that are pretty straight about this stuff, Col and FF have succeeded without the nonsense that has been about recently. There has been advice that any wire will work...i'm sorry if you took that to heart when selecting the wire you bought, but this is a good example of where this kind of advice goes wrong. They are correct that you could use multiple coils and multistranded thinner wire, even I played with this stuff, but if you can't wind it with a single strand or even one coil staisfactory, imagine the problems of winding multistrand or multiple coils together...and none of it proven! Stick to what you know will work, don't cut corners and you will succeed. The driver is and always has been the key to this thing and you are far from having anything that any circuit could save...yet...but you can do it...

Col pretty much summed it all up there... You need the transistor or similar to provide a signal conditioned for the input of the LM386 for it to work effectively and to match with the high impedance of guitar pickups...it's not really there to provide gain but to avoid this "loading" and tone suck. It does not need to be the fetzer design but it will work and although I can't get the specified part down here either, there are substitute equivalents that work in its place (just have to watch the legs are the same function). Same with the wire gauge, although some have suggested otherwise, there are optimal ranges of wire and I have found for my design that 0.2mm is important to get the expected results...thinner wire is definitely not the way to go. That you are getting a little sustain is something, the problem is that the coil is totally mismatched an incapable of providing much force without a lot of power into it to even get a weak response and in harmonic mode it's just squealing from leaking EMI and not EMF. A more efficient driver helps considerably fix these problems. Although a thicker wire might be successful, I think it will take more power than the 0.2mm that was tested extensively to get the same response. As Col is indicating, that was for this particular design, but such things may alter with significantly different approaches like dual coils...but I wouldn't be attempting that kind of thing yet! It's not clear exactly the set up, but there are a few components like magnets and potting that are also important to the success of this project, but if you follow the know working specs and don't cut corners (like leaving out the buffer) it will work...good luck

Well, again it depends on the effect or range of effect that you are after. On a lower drive setting mine is similar to your responses and this is great for a lot of things (pads behind chords for instance, or a bit of a harmonic lift as notes fade out if set very low (mine will allow harmonic effects without infinite sustain, people will recall I never liked the word sustainer as this tech is capable of far more expressive things than holding a note forever!))...don't need to alter that much of the technique. Mine however also goes to very high drive settings, still clean but you do feel the strings being driven...the effect is much more like a very loud guitar that feeds back consistently. Like playing and extremely loud feedback guitar though, you are going to need to change technique to cope with that, damping is of course key...it's not really a plug and play 'effect' but does change the instrument and so requires technique adjustment. The commercial units tend to my ear in comparison not to create that kind of dynamic sound, far too controlled to my liking, but that's my choice of 'effect'. Part of what I wanted to achieve is a controlled consistent musical effect that could be used at any volume or through headphones for recording to get that big guitar sound and the techniques that go with it on occasion. I also like the subtle details and potential for different sounds and atmospheric effects that the device offers in spades. With a slide the guitar sounds can sound a lot like that david lindley/jackson browne slide such as on running on empty for instance. HB drivers and single coils are not the only options, sustainiac and some others have done the 'bi-lateral' options which are more like a fender z-coil or p-bass half and half style thing...this might make a good compromise between EMI reduction and single coil throw...but really, if the single coil style works and isn't causing EMI problems, then I didn't see the reason to pursue it too hard for myself. I have every admiration for those that do get it working to their liking, but I certainly didn't find it 'necessary'. I think also that a lot can be done with the tone shaping of the circuit signal being sent to the driver to even things out...that is why I use things like the 100uF output cap as a rule, with a speaker it is probably very midrange-y to treble (yes, I can't say what the actual response of my driver is numerically, but I know the effect it has and adjust it to sound musical and even). With an amp you routinely use tone shaping to suite a guitar and pickups, even a room or whatever, why not for driver response...it is not that a chip is suspect, but the signal it is sending. Again, a chip like an LM386 allows you to easily do all kinds of tinkering in that regard, but anything will work, maybe in the preamp. With different drivers I suspect there is going to be radically different profiles as well as the signal from the source pickup, I doubt there will be a single 'perfect' circuit. I did the best I could with my latter designs to make if flexible but was surprised to find that it did work on a range of guitars and pickup types so well, all have been a subtly different effect, but all musical and consistent. For thin coils balanced on an HB and working, see the 'sustain box' that was exactly that from years ago. Basically it is the same thing, just using one magnetic polarity of the HB to create a SC thin driver...didn't work as well as any other IMHO and the neck pickup sound was severely compromised on my LP, but of course it works, see Primal's HB adaption or others which were pretty much this kind of thing. Using a known working design is the more obvious approach to these things, deviating by the naive use of pickup wire as 'any coil will do' approach will not work. However, people like Col and FF here desired a different kind of sound and both used HB style drivers to very good effect, and AGC to great effect. Long time followers of the sustainer thread would know that I jumped right into radically different and complex hex designs early and put that aside to develop something that could be made DIY to keep others happy and silence criticism and suspicions then. I now realize that the simpler forms of device have potential and more than satisfy my needs for such a device, for me! Certainly a chip like the LM386 has enough power to do the job and my battery will run for months with the little use I put it through, or hours with use. No one need read that whole thread to get the idea about building one of the formula of know working devices, there are tutorials on both driver making and the project generally in the reference section. It is a project that many have found enthralling enough to build upon, but generally after getting initial positive results with know things and taking it further. It is only in recent years that a loud contingent has questioned and spread misleading information about to undermine that starting point that has served well for years. This has never been a project for just anyone, it's not hard really, especially with a known working design, but not for everyone...just the way it is, this is not a rewiring job!~

Good clips there FF and very similar to response to the kind of effect that Col achieved as well with the AGC. I think that once you are in DIY land and get a feel for things, everyone may want a different response and this has been the way for quite a while I suggest. Personally, I don't like things to be that 'controlled' or mild in response but I do like clean of course. My tele sounds much like this with the intensity control turned right down, very clean and economical on a battery, right down the 386 is only running on a buffer and 20x amplification so I get a pretty clean drive signal there. The tele can be pushed to 200x amplification without a hint of squeal and pretty much no AGC applied and so sounds like a very loud amp feedback guitar but clean (other than the effect of the strings being driven hard electromagnetically) and extremely touch sensitive...hence my suggestion that such simple amplification strategies can work perfectly adequately for this effect...the sound is very much like and ebow with the ability to swell into notes with light picking or hammering on the strings. My intention was never to mimic the commercial units but to see what I could make of it and tailor to my tastes, the latter implementations though had a lot of range..others have had different aspirations as it should be. If you use outboard power, regardless of the stuff about chips (and I went through a lot of different chips and circuit designs throughout) you have the potential for a lot of clean headroom for sure, but for me it has to run off a battery and be light on the modifications necessary for the guitar, in fact, I can't recall ever implementing a sustainer that sacrificed the neck pickup and abandoned the mid-driver thing in part as I didn't like the loss of that distinctive sound on a strat. I treat the sustainer as an 'effect' not an end to itself, after the novelty wears off, you still want a great sounding and playing guitar with the full range that it had and not compromised by these things. But others interests may of course vary...as to the desired effect...as it should. I do wonder whether the dual coil HB style driver has a particular sound though...it would seem to me that the HD types do seem to have a lot less push or something...the very basic single coil designs are not only easier but seem to me to move the strings a little more and well made and designed don't show a lot of EMI by comparison and in my attempts, needed less power to drive them for a similar effect. Each to their own with the chips, but I think that it is a lot of fuss for no particular gain to pursue it so vigorously. The LM386 is a solid cheap and flexible well proven little amp, if one has to quibble about the need to add a zobel, consider this, those two components are 20c and can be adjusted and there is a lot you can do with the LM386 precisely because it is so basic...you can adjust gain structure and output caps and stabilize it and even use it as a basic AGC control designed to the specs required for the project. In my latter circuit design I did use some SMD and even tantalum caps and such, partly to reduce size and partly for quality...none of this is strictly necessary and although I am not keen on the F/R idea (it was not my suggestion after all) and I find the preamp part a bit clumsy and does need the addition of filters as I have consistently specified (and the 100uF output cap to simulate my results) to keep the 386 happy, it has shown to work time and again. Really, I still think a lot has to do with the driver design and construction and the implementation of the whole thing and very good results can be had. I may have spent a lot of trial and error to come up with the results I achieved, but that is as valid a way as any to reach a 'sweet spot' and pass that on. My specs were so others could reproduce the kinds of things that I know work and this has been independently proven enough times to verify it. Sure, a bit thicker wire, more power and clean headroom...but will it achieve the other intentions...low mod, economical battery powered, small circuits, musical sound (to my ears and intentions for the effect), etc? Rewriting the history of why sustainer threads keep getting closed down is just astonishing...really it comes down to personal abuse and a bunch of known lies and assumptions (usually directed at me) all of which are leading people down the wrong path. The LM386 is just an amp chip, it can do the job as any other can, but it is flexible, obtainable, cheap, indestructable, works and is provable. As more details eek out we see some alternatives actually shut down from over heating (something that I observed years back when I tried them) and the necessity for outboard power to get that kind of clean headroom anyway. Well, each to their own. What I don't see in any alternatives except Col's remarkable work (and FF's perhaps by the sound of it) from a fair way back is any cleverness actually specific to this project. My circuit designs are not that clever, but the circuit is tuned to get a pretty even consistent result and sound on all strings and even sustain chords for a fair while before the bass strings predominate and the later ones some AGC, but these other things look like the most basic amp/preamp possible and as such are not anymore clever than the F/R in many respects...it's an amp without loading, all that was ever suggested that was required regardless of the chip used. Now Col's circuit design and ideas like FF feedback were excellent ideas with several different modes of drive and more than enough for people with the insight to tweak to their hearts content if wanted. I like that, but for me I went more compact, simpler and rethought the 'drive' control to produce different effects, used the 386 itself to send signal back to provide a very mild AGC and little caps to filter that signal so that the bass frequencies would be attenuated earlier...it is all pretty basic stuff really and given the general and possibly accurate analysis of my methods and even skill in such things, not such a bad plan really...works for me, and at least it wasn't just cribbed together ideas from others that come up over and over, as the F/R was for instance and garnered such scorn. The secret to me is still very much in the driver and matching of things, lower power and getting that 'sweet spot' and building from there and that has consistently been my opinion. Heavy wire, sure but it changes a lot (more than core material) and perhaps you need more power to get the extra force that this path puts one on...my specifications was not because of some magical mysticism about brands of amps or wire size, but a design that with this elements at least fit the various requirements I set for my own work...low mod, battery powered, economical, sound, response, etc... At least with the basic elements for success in that pursuit I have been completely honest and open about what can work, never suggesting that anything else wouldn't or might well be 'better', but I have yet to see or hear it for the DIY crowd on this one! ... To the OP...there are specific tutorials about wire sizes and such (no need to read 200 pages, that's just nonsense), plenty on magnets as cores to read and you will really need to and certainly you will have to learn a lot more about these tings if you expect to use pickup wire...0.2mm wire for instance is very easy to handle and wind by hand and solder, no you can't just twist together enameled wire when you break it. Unfortunately this project is something that will require either diligently following instructions and examples of what works and/or a lot of study and experimentation...the treads are numerous and long precisely because of this kind of thing, it was never said to be 'easy', though in truth it isn't that hard, but there is a lot more involved than simple guitar rewiring and such and demands a range of skills and a bit of study and knowledge...actually, many people like the project precisely because of this and the amount you can learn...check out all the tutorials and anything else so you get the basics understood I suggest...

I have received a lot of flak in the last year about my choice to stick with the LM386 for my work. Sure, I have tried heaps of different options with varied results, but I still found the chip fairly indestructible, easy to obtain and very flexible in the way they can be used...they are not state of the art, but then most modern chips are not designed to cope with such applications anyway and this can have unwanted side effects including total shutdown due to heating...but that is not to say they can't work. So the answer is that fairly consistently I have had good results from the LM386 and it seems to provide plenty of power to make the strings vibrate as much as anyone would reasonably want with my coil designs. I still use a 100uF output cap on such 386 based circuits for the sustainer...generally. The preamp more buffer stage is there pretty much to avoid loading, matching the impedance of the circuit to the typical guitar pickups. I used to use a fair amount of gain, but this was overloading the input of the LM386 making it distort, sometimes useful with low powered pickups, but generally I have not found a lot of gain necessary. The F/R fits this bill, but I suggested mods to make it a bit more stable...it has worked for some without these apparently. There is a lot of controversy about my recommendation for a particular wire gauge (0.2mm), this was found to be the best for me by trial and error of winding similar coils, same circuits with various wire gauges. I've still found this to be an efficient design. The harmonic mode is a harmonic generated above the normal sound of the note...often a fifth or fourth plus an octave, but sometimes simply an octave. Mixed mode, I am not sure what you are doing to get this? I get a kind of mixed sound with my 100uF cap on higher power on the lower notes, a kind of bloom into a harmonic, and this is the sound I choose to have as my default on my guitars. The G string can be particularly easy to drive, but muting is vital with any sustainer guitar. If using if for recording or whatever, you can cheat if there is no open strings in use by lightly wrapping a sock or something around the nut end of the strings...but damping, important to learn anyway! It's not clear exactly how you have set things up...are you saying that you have mounted the pickup between the neck and bridge pickups and working? I did try all kinds of mid coil drivers with little practical success and when I did get things that worked, it was kind of a little pointless for the effort. So, except for the experimental projects, all of my drivers are in the neck position and use the bridge pickup exclusively as are commercial units. I use a 4pdt switch on multi pickup guitars to completely disconnect all pickups, select the bridge regardless of selector position and turn the power on. So, no real secret with the circuit, but if yours works and happy with it, go with that. I don't think there are any magic in chip numbers, the idea of the amp is to simply produce an AC signal in the simplest implementation, to do more you need to invest a lot of time and effort and experimentation to carry it off. Really I'd need to see a little more detail to make a lot of comment on how your device is going and such, it can be difficult sometime to know what people have done and the results they have achieved, this project has a history of people going their own way and this can result in radically different outcomes at times, leading to confusion as to a lot of things and make it seem as if problems some people are having plague everyone's work...high string response say, or the effectiveness of a circuit that happens to use a particular chips and such. ... Sorry, got called away for quite a bit before I could send reply, the sustainer thread has lots on such things as HB drivers and the like and this kind of thing will take again, experimentation and work, those who have done similar like Col with HB drivers posted a lot for instance and many designs are offered up there including things like Col's more adventurous circuit ideas, but if making circuits is outside your skill set you may be operating on a hit and miss basis with your skill set, just a thought, no reason not to have a go if you have a mind to of course.

Thanks for sharing... I bought this and put it forward as having some potential at some point in the thread. There's a good little LM386 with preamp kit in canada from hobbytron also that I mentioned to that had potential (but would not sell outside canada or the usa for me to test it). Again, just about any amp will work if the coil is suitable which has always been my contention. I didn't do much with this kit, mine at least had the on/off switch in the pot, that I assume yours does, and it didn't lend itself easily to the kinds of installations that I do which require a bit of bypass switching to deal with more than just a bridge pickup...but it certainly did work as did many other designs for circuits offered by many. By the time I got this one though I had already refined my own circuits cheaper and easier for my purposes and the project generally, I had some concerns that there may be loading issues, good to hear if there are not changes in guitar tone with the circuit in play as this is not really desirable. I looked into the source kits from artec as well for other versions. Cruising around electronics sites will often provide good kits of various types, as I have mentioned many times, all my early work was done with slight mods to the CHAmp and PreCHAmp kits that only cost a few dollars and were cheaper than separate components. Even better response were possible with slight mods as I say to these things, with the LM386 kits I always suggest the replacement of the usually 220uF output cap that also features on the F/R design for a 100uF cap, this seems to give better string balance often able to sustain chords quite well, and better high string response, the rest of it is identical to the LM386 data sheet really, so nothing special there except that the F/R design as offered omitted parts to help keep it stable. I have had no problem with high string response that many apparently find or assume are a problem and often such things can be found to be more a problem with the coil potting, design, apparently wire gauge (that many refute) and distortions and oscillation feedback. I suggest a particular wire gauge because I know the results tested alongside others, it is a myth to suggest that I or anyone else suggests there is something magical at work here. This gauge and design simply worked better with consistent results for me. Different gauges have different characteristics and power requirements, my choice and suggestion is just my balance of factors and known to work. 30AWG wire is bigger than I have suggested before and I suspect it may take the more power you have in this circuit to get the results you have obtained, it would appear that many have sought more power with such coils with success. It's good if this amp and coil combo works without producing distortions and noise in the pickup from EMI or other factors, more power can often lead to more squeal or other unwanted interference I have found, in later designs I continued towards using the least power possible to get the result I liked...battery life, EMI and other factors influencing this direction...the main thing is of course that it works! The circuits I designed in recent times were intended to bridge that gap for people that wanted a purpose built compact circuit adaptable to their projects, it contained most of the features people might want on board, and was not a pasting together of various other circuits as the F/R is, but this project would still require a varied skill set to be successful. The wafer coil was also designed to address the coil winding aspects. Unfortunately, for various reasons the release of these has been permanently (it would seem) postponed. My design for people who know what they are doing is able to be basically replicated from the information provided, but not suitable for general construction and obtaining of parts for your average builder, it does use the LM386 chip as it happens as the basic building block which clearly is out of favor with some, but allowed basic AGC to be implemented to save power, avoid noise and give more control and options from the 'drive' control. Such touches are just icing on the cake, the circuit is basically an amplifier, the chip as long as it does the job is a bit of a red herring as most have been found to be suitable. Some modern chips though are designed for music type things and not the constant high level signal that a sustained string offers up, and has heat problems and auto shutoff features that activate under these conditions. This is why I stopped experimenting with these alternatives some time ago, but certainly there is nothing 'magical' about the LM386 and the F/R was never the kind of design I would have advocated (though many have found it to work well and suggested mods make it work much like mind have from the past). But this is the nature of the project, it is not for everyone or every situation. Glad to hear you have found some success and if used with just a single pickup guitar, should work fine as is I would imagine.

Sorry, no can do video... Extensive thread on this guitar is here...Blueteleful Telecaster Project The micro switch has a 'throw' of less than 1mm, so you wouldn't want anything more sensitive than that, and obviously these things are designed to be pressed a fair bit. Mounting it, I used a bit of wood as I recall, thin ply...the pots need spacers on a tele because of the thin plate, so that the wood is held on by one of the pots (actually I believe it is on the gibson style selector switch) next to it and the black activating bit sticks through a simple hole along with the blue sustainer indicator light along side the volume control... The whole guitar above, the controls below... You can see that there is a chrome and tortoiseshell theme going on there and the switch and light are hidden by a small piece between the volume and selector that also hides the old switch slot in the tele's plate. There is an audio link in that thread that probably still works, the sustainers battery was running very low there, and it is a bit rough, but I don't think I demoed the killswitch feature. Basically it just shorts the signal turning the guitar off when pressed. The way my guitar is wired it kills all signal including that to the sustainer circuit so it does work with the sustainer but while 'killed' the sustainer stops, but the strings of course still vibrate so that when open again the sustainer takes over again, this can be effective when the sustainer is on the verge of harmonics though, but it is obviously the simplest to wire on an already complex guitar with little room in it! I had been messing around with kill switch ideas for another commissioned project that used them a lot...I thought up a 'maim' switch, it doesn't kill it but switches in a small cap that killed all the highs, so it has an extreme wha kind of effect, switching between the normal sound and that of the guitar with the tone turned most of the way off, I spent ages trying different caps to get the right kind of filtering, but not hard to do either. I used a pull pot to switch between 'maiming' and 'killing' as I recall. I'm not personally a big fan or got a lot of use for a kill switch myself though and I completely forget that the thing is there...it is a kind of gimmick really IMHO...and I find the switch a little anti-intuitive compared to the toggling on the guitar sound that a guy like tom morello favours to be easier to use. Still if you like toys, this is a discrete way of adding one with minimum mods and in small spaces.

My tele has a secret micro-kill-switch...and a sustainer too! You can't really see it without that bright flash to show it up and I forget it's there. But I use it as a kind of manual tremolo occasionally on held chords and such. Put it on because I could and for fun!