Fresh Fizz

Hi Neil, How about teemuk's book that's for free? (ssguitar.com) http://www.thatraymo...yttala_v1.0.pdf cheers, FF

Hi McSeem, Nice to see there is a hexaphonic project year 2. Can I already order the dvd for the complete series? If I interpret your question well:"Would guitar players appreciate these type of sounds, would they use them?" The hex-distortion is a winner for sure. If I were in your place I would focus on the distortion before anything else. Get a great distorted sound without effects even when mixed/panned into stereo (or even mono into guitar amp). Combined with the hex-sustainer your rig is already totally unique and the most versatile guitar on the planet. Do you really need separate delays (or other FX) for each string separately? Would hex-sound downmixed into 2 channels used as input for 2 delays not be a reasonable alternative? And then use a stereo poweramp. Even the 2 delays could be panned instead of being hard-left and hard-right, if you know what I mean. If you're interested I have some distortion sounds to be used as reference: cheers FF

The applet is correct as long as you don't use a bottleneck from the bridge side of the string to change the pitch. Or screwdriver in a Sonic Youth fashion For ease of use you should 'detune' a bit, use 125 Hz instead of 110 Hz. cheers FF

The best thing is to try out the uglyface for yourself. But I think you're able to achieve much better results with the dod280. A. The distorted sound of the uglyface gets blended with the sound of the sustaining guitar string. The string serves as some kind of reverb spring for the distorted overtones that's emitted by the driver. But the frequency response is not flat, which is demonstrated in Tillman's applet . Move the pickup towards the bridge and you lose the lows, fizzy fuzz on top of the original clean sound is the result. B. A compressor (limiter) with a slow release time acts less aggressive than a distortion box. A distortion wants to sustain immediately but a compressor sags during the attack and needs to recover. When you use a lot of compression you need a long release time. You want to limit the available headroom and let the lm386 clip the signal? I don't see what's so magical about an overdriven lm386. Wouldn't a clipping device and a master volume before the lm386 work just the same? But if you want to go crazy experimenting I have something for you. Like a power soak, place a small resistor (4 - 8 ohms/1W?) in series with the driver. Or like a tube rectifier, place a resistor (47 - 100 ohms/1W?) between V+ and the lm386 pinout 6 together with cap. Of course at your own risk, cheers FF

Split coil like on Fender precision basses, huge core like some high output humbuckers (+ agc design that allows for a higher self-inductance). My driver functions as neck pickup too. This was Wasp's question: To me it seems that Wasp knows what he is talking about. The commercial ones are not drawing 0.5 W, because of the use of agc. But why don't you answer the question? I chose not having to use a battery. That doesn't mean that my sustainer consumes more power than yours. On the contrary I would say. You talk about balance but what you're doing is pushing the battery to its limit. To say it in your jargon: Exhausting a battery as quickly as possible seems to be one of your criteria. Is the power consumption of a compressor more in the range of a fuzz box or of a mini power amp? Now I'm a bit confused (cannot compare..., own criteria..., optimum formula?) If you had said easy to build especially for n00bs, no difficult setup, will fit inside the guitar... cheers FF

A debate is only possible between open-minded people who share an interest in improving a product. Telling other people not to look any further because I build this or that product is not debating. It's marketing, promoting your own stuff. Down with the marketing! Let us debate. Why would anyone who is interested in building sustainers not prefer circuitry designed specifically for sustainers over a general purpose mini power amp? Yes indeed, those wicked Fetzer-Rubys. cheers FF

How about the Fetzer-Ruby that was posted by Galaga Mike in his sustainer tutorial? FF

Some of the eggheads could use some feedback by you guys. Build a driver together with a bare bones sustainer amp (no agc) as suggested by psw. And if you're not entirely happy with the performance report it back in the forum. Don't expect a free ride. If there's enough demand for a more sophisticated sustainer, who knows what will happen. I could come up with something or perhaps col could repost his design. cheers FF

ok Jogi, One thing you could do is reverse the leads of the driver (reverse the phase - but I doubt an inefficient driver in harmonics mode is the problem) You probably get radio Zagreb because of the high gain of the lm386, some 200 x. To me it makes most sense to test the fet Q1 now. If you don't have a scope disconnect the volume pot from pinout 2 and connect it up to your guitar amp. So you need a 2 wire cable to your amp, ground and signal (= taper of volume pot). The fet should amplify the signal by some 10 - 20 times. If you compare fet inserted with guitar straight to amp there should be a noticeable difference in volume. I also see 2 ways to improve stability: A. add a zobel network at pinout 5. B. swap the inputs of the 386, pinout 3 to signal, pinout 2 to ground. FF

No, you don't need distortion, you need sufficient gain. I don't see what's the problem. You have an amp that works and should have enough gain. The driver seems to be all right. You don't notice anything when you switch on/off your sustainer? Do you manage to get some sustain (even very weak) or is there no sustain at all? The driver coil above the 12th fret should sustain your open strings in fundamental mode. If you move the driver towards your guitar pickup do you get screaming feedback, squeal? If you move your driver towards your guitar pickup you should get noise out of your guitar amp, period! Cheers FF

Hey man without quote button, The whole agc thing is nothing more than some kind of compressor/limiter that has to be transplanted into your sustainer circuitry. So best to take a look first at the tangerine peeler which has feedforward as well as a feedback sidechain. Filters, no! Ldrs are used in compressors like the flatline compressor (not feedforward). So ldrs yes if you know how to do it! I can't offer anything from col's circuit design. Even if I had it, there's ownership rights that have to be respected. :aureole: Cheers FF

The 'criterion' is solid sustain (for me at least) across the fretboard for the *least* battery consumption - so, while you may wish to call such related 'efficiency critereon' as arbitary ..I just interpret it as meaning the lowest battery running costs (or being a cheapskate for short) So you're going to work by ear. Build a driver coil do a soundcheck and if the behaviour for the high notes is still acceptable take thicker wire and use more turns of windings. You don't know beforehand how much highs you can afford to lose. Depends on the guitar, guitar pickup, applied eq , all-pass filters as well. Only afterwards you can measure what it means for the gauss output per frequency. But it's interesting to see how close you get towards the 256 turns of the sustainiac. Cheers FF

Yes, but most efficient only according to some arbitrary criterion. You have to settle on a frequency range. Maximizing gauss output at 2 kHz or at 500 Hz ? FF

This driver was approved by the Habsburg dynasty lol looks nice, i see no reason why this driver shouldn't work. I thought maybe you tested the lm386 with a a little loudspeaker. Never mind, can you tell what you got between lm386' pinout 1 & 8? Is there some gain pot (or resistor) like in the ruby? FF

I'm glad that your glass is halve full, that's the spirit. Some questions: But inside the coil there is an iron core, right? You didn't burn out the driver coil? Does it still measure 8 ohms? There is no wrong side for the driver, from above works even better. (Sustain more balanced from open string up to highest fretting positions.) Do you have enough gain? Does your guitar overdrive the lm386? FF

No I don't recall any tests on current draw. Col, one of the guys over here, has come up with an agc that utilizes a feedforward sidechain. The agc regulates the signal level right at the guitar pickup. This way the swing amplitude of the string is being controlled. This will save energy. How to save more energy? Like you already said, more windings on the driver coil (it might well be that the sustainiac's spec is the optimal performance). It depends on whether the agc can deal with the behaviour in the high freqencies region, but it certainly would make your system more energy efficient for low frequencies. Depending on how 'quiet' your driver and pickup are (humbucking?/shielding?) you can increase the gain in the pickup-amp-driver-string-pickup positive feedback loop and limit the swing amplitude even more. And yes an LM386 or a TDA7231A which I use will get hot so class D would help. I'm afraid I skipped that class, mine is on 12V power supply. Cheers FF

One of the biggest arguments we had in the sustainer thread was about whether a what I call bare bones sustainer (fet + power-ic + driver) would do the job. (Too many dead spots to my taste, I don't expect miracles not even from the perfect driver coil.) Some of the guys (me too) moved away from the bare bones sustainer: agc, agc and microcontrollers, fx pedals before the sustainer amp, hexaphonic sensors + drivers in combination with dsp. The sustainiac you've mentioned isn't exactly a bare bones one. When one starts using agc not having enough magnetic drive isn't really an issue. I used 130 turns/1mH and 180 turns/1.8mH and both humbucker drivers performed well. (A more noticeable difference was caused by the difference in distance between the 2 coils of the humbucker.) It seems to me that you fit in psw's school of thought. (0.5%, wow!) He's a firm believer in the bare bones sustainer. He did all the experiments with the various wire sizes. If someone knows the recommended target it should be him. Haven't received a pm from psw already? cheers FF

Hi Wasp, That's a good question to start with, I wished my reply could be a quickie. There's some formulas in it, I hope it doesn't scare you off. But I understand your question as looking past the down-to-earth issues like "how do I build it" so this is the best I could come up with. Power amp requirements A certain amount of power is required to keep a guitar string sustaining. When using a battery the amount of available power is limited. So efficient use of the available power becomes very important. An lm386 will deliver the most power when the load (sustainer driver coil) is 8 ohms. Lower than 8 ohms will only heat up the lm386 more, higher than 8 ohms will decrease the current. Sustainer driver coil considerations How do you judge a guitar pickup? Not by the amount of turns of windings or the diameter of the copper wire. What matters is the sound of the pickup which is characterized by its resonance frequency which depends on the self-inductance of the pickup. There is a peak at the resonance frequency and above that peak the signal gets weaker and weaker (high-cut filter). The story is more or less the same for the sustainer driver coil. The extra concern is whether or not the high-cut filter will prevent sustain to occur in higher fretting positions or in harmonic mode. As a matter of fact we're not talking about the same high-cut filter as in case of a guitar pickup. (The resonance frequency of the sustainer driver coil is very high.) The high-cut filter we're dealing with consists of the real component R (8 ohms resistance of the driver coil) and the imaginary component X(L) which is 'caused' by the coil. X(L) increases with the frequency, so the higher the frequency, the higher is X(L). And X(L) increases with the amount of windings. And here we have to find a compromise namely: 1. The driver coil is most efficient at a certain frequency when X(L) is small compared to R. 2. More turns of windings on the driver coil makes it more efficient at low frequencies. Or in the analogy of the guitar pickup, more windings give more output but you lose some highs. Another issue is the rest of the stuff being used. It makes a difference whether you build a bare bones sustainer device (lm386 + driver) or a more sophisticated one with agc, eq, all-pass filters and so on. I don't think there is an optimum target it's merely a matter of personal taste. Perhaps some minimum requirement, every note has to sustain? This is how I measure the self-inductance of a driver coil. The oscilloscope is actually a simple HandyProbe. (d) and (e) are the negative consequences of the self-inductance. (e) Because the signal at the driver coil is somewhat out of phase with the signal detected by the guitar pickup the efficiency is reduced. This could theoretically be compensated by means of all-pass filters. (d) The load is not 'ohmic', impedance Z is bigger than 8 ohms, less current (power amp requirements). a. find resonance frequency F(res) (maximum voltage drop on oscilloscope) b. calculate inductance L of driver coil (L in Henry, F(res) in Hertz, C in Farad) L = 1 /(4π² * F(res)² * C) c. Calculate reactance X(L) for a specific frequency ( X(L) in ohm, F in Hertz) X(L) = 2π * F * L d. Calculate impedance Z for that frequency (Z in ohm, R in ohm) Z = √(X(L)² + R²) e. Calculate phase shift for that frequency ArcTan (X(L) / R) So there are 2 ways to go. By ear, build a driver coil and if the behaviour for the high notes is still acceptable take thicker wire and use more turns of windings. By spec, work towards a certain self-inductance. Cheers FF

I get the picture. The output (speaker) seems ok to me because it's buzzing. (You're using a battery, right? Not some unregulated net adapter.) How about the input of the lm386? Any schematic here that resembles your design? Check if pinout 3 goes to signal (taper of trimpot) and pinout 2 to ground. FF

So you have a sustainer driver coil in the neck position and the bridge humbucker split? If that's the case I would advice you to not split the humbucker and send its output signal to the guitar amp as well as to the sustainer amp. The humbucking functionality should reduce/stop the magnetic feedback, the buzzing sound that you're hearing. cheers FF

You win

The next sustainer topic will be called Sustainer Builders Pub in the off topics chat sessions. Lower the level of expectation. Take the rants and BS for granted. Just behave like you're in the pub.

I understand. But what if a moderator gets acquainted with abuse on the forum in an alternative manner and not via some report button that's been pressed? No need to apologise for a post that is perfectly understandable for an attentive reader. O you mean make sure it's take-finger-not-the-whole-hand proof. Sorry. I see that therizky is still around, of course you shouldn't be hiding, and you did nothing wrong. Sell as many sustainers as you can. Sorry, but I don't understand the bad guy - **** hole thing, do I want to know this? FF

Not in the way you mean it, I guess. Or do these animals of yours start to curse in finnish when poked? You're making the mistake to think in terms of good mods, bad forum members. That the good mods use the forum rules to keep the forum members on the right track. Not so long ago there was a "prove to me you're not a sociopath" incident where the hunter became the hunted. A very nasty event that only stopped after Drak and I intervened. Can you tell me why there wasn't a moderator prepared to take action? You say that abusive behaviour will be addressed directly. Can you tell me that there was a verdict or some conclusion reached after this event took place? Read it back in the topics, more abusive behaviour by one and the same person was never addressed. Afraid of him? Don't know about Drak but I never got a thanks by the mod team for acting in a critical situation. Greetings FF

Therizky, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU! Can't you be happy standing in the shadow like the rest of the bunch.