Kyle Cavanaugh

That's a great looking top! Very unique body style as well!

Those both are really impressive looking!

http://www.local81.com/bass/07%20My%20Pain.wma correction. Nice song, but I can't really hear the bass, just the double bass pedal.

You could use a bridge rectifier running into a capacitor (to take out the DC bias) to double the frequency (octave up, 2nd harmonic). I *think* if you ran diodes in series with the signal (to cut off the bottom) and ran an electrolitic cap in parallel (+ to +, - to -), you'd get a decent octave down (2nd sub-harmonic), I could be wrong though. but the fact that around .7 volts is dropped acrossed a diode should be taken into consideration, you'd need an amplifier stage driving it that had somewhere between 2 and 4 voltage gain to keep it from getting too quiet. Of course if you want to get it more sinsoidial you could run it into another common-emmiter\drain stage and tweak the way you swamp it to adjust symmetry and such. A summing amplifier (an op-amp circuit) could be used to mix the wet and dry signals together. You can use logic chips to change frequency pretty easy (if you know what you're doing), but you'll get square waves because of it either being 1 or 0. There are ways to unsquare a square wave, though. I bet the fact that there is a sharp attack (it looks like an inverse square function) when you run a sine wave through a Schmitt Trigger might have some benefits for the sustainer... I don't smoke, but I need this! LOL

That is what I was planning on doing with this new pickup design of mine. I think the reason a ferromagnetic material won't be charged up well by a rare earth in the IMMEDIATE vacinity is because since they are so strong, the magnetic field will be huge and since they are circular if not acted upon by an outside force (the iron will distort it), there's only a little bit of the magnetism affecting the material. Maybe if you took say a narrow (1/8" would be plenty probably) rare earth bar magnet and had it in the middle in place of the bar magnet on a normal humbucker. Bill Lawrence does this with a 1/4" ceramic bar on his L500 series. Regarding my amplfier driving the thing, it's definetely different. The input stage is a Common-Source (based off of Don Tillman's design) on it while that is a Common-Drain. That one amplifies current a great deal and has less than one voltage gain, while mine amplifies current and has about 2 voltage gain and amplifies current as well. I also have a 10uF cap acrossed pins 1 and 8 for a lot more gain on the LM386. The FET I got (as it was the only small signal audio one I could find in any of the junk boards at school) is a 2SK163 which I believe is an N-Junction MOSFET. I got it out of the radio reciever on a fairly new car stereo (don't worry, it was already broke beyond repair). The pickup I'm using for the input is a Bill Lawrence L280 which is an extremely low-noise, very clean single-coil sized humbucker. It was TOO transparent in my guitar which is the reason it didn't stay. Wait a sec, the max input voltage on the LM386 is only like 400 mV! I suppose if I want to keep a clean signal when volume is turned up (I got a 10K pot after the preamp), I better go with that kind of input stage. I'm pretty sure the impedance is lower on that one too, so I think there might be less noise.

Yeah installing those doesn't really require deep knowledge in the electronic theory department (electrical of course though), not saying it's an easy job, though. I really need to get into the 21st century with one of those! LOL

Reading you were an electrician I was hoping you understood what a n iso transformer was! I'd be wondering if you were actually certified! LOL The one I've used has 60 ohm and 80 ohm (to make up for losses) windings and says SPT-115 on it. You can pretty much bet the output impedance is only a couple of hundred ohms coming out of the pedal. Saber I believe you're right, that is what I did with the pedals going into the front end.

OK, I drew up the schematic for the amplifier (N-Junction FET input stage going into a 386 chip) in one of my study halls (being able to look up datasheets on the school library's internet computers helped). It's a pretty simple circuit to assemble.

Good point considering there's a lot more factors such as magnet size and shape and how the magnetic field passes through the string(s) and the coil (s). Luckily, I was able to learn a considerable amount of information on magnetism in my electronics class and through Steven Kersting's Site in the past 2 years:

Hopefully the dynamics will be present! LOL I plan on using Neodymium in my design (mainly for space reasons...) and my Nd heaphones seem to have pretty good dynamics all acrossed the spectrum! (I owned basically the same pair before, only with ceramics and those were brittle and weak) Kinda bassy, but I might just need that accentuation!

an octave divider is an octave divider. You sure you wanna have a lower octave? Do you mean a higher octave? Basses are really low on the hearing spectrum of frequencies to start with. Try some out at a store or something, there's no real rule on these things, I would request to try them through a BASS amp though, you could blow the speaker (s) on a guitar amp if it's turned up too loud and bass amps are usually geared more to having a more linear response (my bass amp is pretty sterile, at least.)

I definetely have used SK's site as a reference in my research! "In keeping with my no BS rule, I am going to tell you my pickups are OVER PRICED... That's right, I said it....my pickups are too expensive for what they are. The simple fact is they are JUST PICKUPS. Most of the marketing BS out there is pure "VODOO". That's not to say there isn't some "vodoo" in making pickups, the question is which do you need, if any." That's a lesson too many of us still need to learn!

If you were able to put some sort of 1:1 Audio transformer after the pedal you'd probably solve the problem. If you don't want to mod your amp (I wouldn't on anything that expensive!), you could actually put in it a little project box wired to 1/4" jacks (like a pedal) and just put a jumper cable over to the primary (which will have less resistance of the two windings in case you have trouble figuring it out) and plug the long cable going to the effects return into the secondary. If you can do basic soldering (literally only 4, maybe 8 solder joints!) and drill and there's an electronic components store nearby (eg. Radio Shack) you could make this for less than $20 USD. It can go right on your pedalboard or you could put velcro on the box and the pedal so they stay together. When I first made one of these, I seriously thought about how easily I could be reeling in the dough selling these on E-Bay! LOL BTW, you'd be amazed how much noise gates can help sometimes. I got this DOD FX-30 Noise Gate (older than me probably!) off of E-Bay for $30 and there's a send and return for it, the input signal and the loop signal (where you put the pedals) work in conjunction by adjusting a knob to get you the most natural decay when done right. Kicks serious butt for those high-gain distortion pedals where hum and hiss are an issue! Stopping and starting sounds SOOO killer with it!

You wouldn't need another battery for the sustainer, just splice off your 9V already in there, current consumption is not very high at all on either circuit. Active pickups are probably better for the sustainer because the impedance is lower and much more suited for the LM386. I might actually suggest a preamp based off of a FET or an Op-Amp so that you can have a very high impedance (what passive pickups are) at the input and be able to have lower impedance, from a few megohms down to 10Kohms or less. From what I understand, you'll have a wider frequency band and less noise coming from the LM386. As for the driver, how about using soft iron laminations (like on a transformer or those old Gretsch pickups) if you don't have access to any rare earth, that way, you could have a humbucker-type configuration. It would NOT be a humbucker, although the sensor could being a single coil size humbucker if one wanted, I'm not sure whether or not the hum picked up by a single-coil would be induced upon the strings and picked up or not. The iron laminations would insure as much magnetic strength as possible, with little eddy currents nonetheless, is in the coil, increasing how much this sustainer will feedback. One coil would be a normal pickup coil as the "microphone" (input) and this coil, of course wound with MUCH thicker wire, would be the "speaker" (output). 28 AWG magnet wire got me in the 8 ohm region filling a humbucker bobbin and takes like 400 to 500ish winds. I'm planning to try making a sustainer really soon, it's mainly a matter of finding a guitar to put it in. I also just so happen to be ordering some Neodymium rod magnets for other reasons as well... It could easily be made as a single coil sized device (stacked coils) I'd definetely put such a device in the neck or middle pickup slot in a guitar. Just my 2 cents.

Um, whaa? I don't think I ever put out a challenge, but if you're using any device that attacks and sustains differently than the magnetic you're tying to emulate, you're dead in the water. The modelers are already able to show graphs with two identical wavelengths, one "real" and the other modeled. The problem is when the guitar is being played by a real player with nuances. You can't turn the attack and decay of a piezo into a strat single in the analog realm without lots of frequency specific expansion. And in the digital realm you're only closer by a little bit. Sounding right and feeling right are two totally different things. I hope you figure out a way to do both. Then again, traditional guitar pickups on an OEM basis run between $5-$30 or so. If it aint broke.... ← I'm not using piezo pickups, I will be using my own design of magnetic pickups that are very hi-fi, at least for magnetic pickups, you'll see. Since they'll go in place of real pickups (in this case they'll be humbucker sized) they will be picking up the strings just as any normal magnetic pickup would, but less colored. There is about 3 or 4 different aspects that need to be addressed in the electronics department which will easily allow me to allow switching on a 4-throw switch (rotary or lever) without needing to even come up with a logic circuit for it, I could do many things with just one throw then! What I can't do though, is emulate how much the strings will be pulled by the magnets in the pickup, unless maybe I made electromagnets... The string pull's actually going to be far less than normal pickups anyways, allowing more natural sustain. Regardless of that matter, even if they don't sound just like the real thing, they won't have the bad side effects commonly associated with them, think EMG's taken about 10 steps further. Sorry to be a brown noser, I shouldn't be saying this BS until my theory is made into a reality. But since this is a senior project for my electronics class and it's due May 1, it won't be too long until the first prototypes roll around. My entire design is near completion.

I think his main focus was to show people how to make the winders and to just give you a brief overview of how to wind a pickup. There are a lot of places on the net where for free you can learn more about winding pickups. There's even some websites that tell you what the winding specs are on a lot of the popular models.

Hey Frank, I'm about to prove you wrong about emulating pickups in an analog manner! So many people with knowledge in electronics will be kicking themselves in the @$$ going, "You're joking, how could it have been that simple?!?!" Better than the Variax it will be for sure, but of course you can't emulate the non-ideal characteristics exactly, not in a practical way at least.

Man, I really hope the guitar I'm building right now (OK I bought a neck) turns out as good as that! I'd be SOOOO happy! BTW, it actually looks rather original for something that was Strat inspired!

For writing a "how to" book? I don't think so. ← Well, I guess if you consider people can put on the internet how to make illegal drugs and pipe bombs without getting in trouble, you got a point! I wish some people would know better to not follow some "How-To's" I can see it now: "How to Make Your Own Meth Lab and Kill Yourself with Phosphide Gas"

It'll work. If you want to save some money and you have a decent understanding of how to read schematics, building one of these will get you there pretty easy, as well. http://www.till.com/articles/GuitarPreamp/ The impedances will match with each other then. If you're using a 250K-1M pot for volume, put it before the preamp. If it's 25K like EMG provides you, put it after. Adding a preamp will change the tone in a pickup in that it will have more clarity as it doesn't have the capacitance in the cable affecting it as much due to a lower output impedance. If you don't like the added clarity, you can try experimenting with different cap values in parallel with the pickup before the preamp to cut off the higher frequencies. Somewhere between 47 and 220 pf should do it.

I'd be surprised if EVH hasn't sued this guy yet! http://www.paintyourownguitar.com/gw5150.html

The impedance on piezo elements are in fact, very high impedance, just like most magnetic pickups. Adding up the non-ideal features of both, and drawing out a circuit of those, they also act the same way. They both are linear (ideally again) until a certain frequency, have a narrow spike (this can vary, it's called the 'Q') then go downhill in response in the frequencies higher than this peak. The lower the pot value, the less of a peak you''ll have, as it's only limiting the current capabilities, not the voltage, the rest should be unaffected. But, since the frequency of a piezo is usually tuned well above audible levels, you should be unaffected in volume pretty much, I could be wrong though. With 500K you should be fine running it passive, especially considering it's A. Acoustic and B. a Bass. Piezo elements can be used to generate some pretty high voltages, with low current, the ones they use in grill igniters makes about a one inch arc, and they're fun for zapping people with! LOL :-P

I think Eddie would like to be able to get that glossy of a finish! LOL I like them!

Edit: Looking at it now, I'd have to say it's a 3 or 4 piece assembly for each tuner. One bolt screws in and locks the string. What it screws into is a tube with threading on the inside AND outside, the outside threading onto a pair of bushings (back and front) which have a little channel in them to keep the string from going left or right of alignment going to the string nut. Looks like a really cool design, still! Screw being socially acceptable, if it works better, you'll have the last laugh. If noone took those risks, we wouldn't have tremelos or geared tuners They used to use wood pegs and depend on friction! Oh yeah, did I mention steel stringed guitars? I think it looks cool, personally. People thought the Floyd Rose looks ugly, too!

Well, I guess I found my answer! http://www.ibanez.com/guitars/guitar.asp?model=JEM77B