Galaga_Mike

Thanks for the input. I've only plugged it in for a short while, but the pickups actually sounded a little muddy (probably because they're horrible pickups). Now that you mention it, though, it sounds really bright unplugged. Now I know why I keep playing twangy country licks on what is supposed to be a shredder guitar. I'll get some more playing time through an amp before I decide on a finish. Thanks!

Yeah, I was really worried about that. It turns out that it only hangs off at the very corner of the pickup ring. There's an optical illusion in the pictures with the grain. Anyway, I'm planning on putting a piece of sandpaper on the contour and sanding down the bottom of the pickup rings for a custom fit. To answer another question, I'm planning on doing some kind of natural oil finish since I've never done that before and this project is all about new things. I'm thinking tru-oil, but I haven't read about what kind would be the best. Suggestions anyone?

Thanks! For the carve I routed a lip with a router overhang jig (one I saw here, I forget who posted it) and then carved with an angle grinder with a 60 grit wheel. The pickups are from a Hondo strat copy. Not surprising that they sound terrible, but those where the only black pickups I had and I started this guitar with the idea that I wouldn't buy any hardware. Now I like it and so I'll upgrade.

First full string up. It took a lot of truss rod and intonation adjustments but it's playing great now. Since last post I've put on the black binding, made some pickup rings out of bocote, and cleaned up a lot of the rough spots. I give myself a C+ on binding, I've got a lot to learn. Overall, it's a really comfortable guitar and it's really lightweight. The pickups I used are really bad, though, so I'm sure I'll order new ones since the guitar plays so nicely.

Yeah, it's right but it looks funny because the treble side is much longer to accommodate the bar. That's my first tremelo mounting experience so I checked it a million times. As I mentioned earlier, the one problem that I should have avoided is that everything (bridge, pickups, tremelo) is shifted off of the center line about 1/4" to the treble side. Oh well, live and learn.

Finished the carving and did most of the rough sanding. I still have a lot of work to do on the details.

New progress...I've routed out the pickup cavities, the rim for carving, and the recess for binding. The holes for the electronics are also drilled. Ignore the mess on the top of the body, I've been using a spray adhesive to stick templates to the body.

Hey everyone, This is my third guitar. I had a lot of black hardware from various guitars. I'm not a fan of black hardware so I'm taking this opportunity to try some new techniques. The shape is kind of a distorted LP. This one will have a carved maple top with cherry base. Laminated cherry and maple for the neck and bocote fretboard. Floyd tremelo, locking nut, and two humbuckers. Like I said this is a learning experience more than anything. First carved top, first tremelo, first laminated neck, first custom inlay (although it's simple and small), first bolt on neck from scratch. So far I think it's going really well except that the neck and strings ended up a little off center relative to the body (stupid measurement mistake during planning stages). It still plays great, so it's just aesthetic. I've finished the neck and bolted it on for a quick string up. It looks pretty good. Now I'll disassemble and carve and mount electronics. Thanks for looking! Mike

I'm working on my first carved top guitar, and I can't figure out how I want to mount the pots. I know that some people keep the pots perpendicular to the guitar by drilling holes before carving and routing little "pockets" in the top for the knobs to sit in. I think I've seen on the forum somewhere that someone uses a router bit stuck into a drill to route the back side of the hole so that the pot sits at the same angle of the carved top. Does anyone know where this was or who did it? I've searched for a while with no luck. Any opinions on the best way to do this? Thanks, Mike

Hey Godin, I've been following this thread closely, I really like this guitar. Could you clear up the "neck through" part of your guitar for me? Your first post sounds like you were going to make a standard neck through with wings. The pictures and the posts after that make it sound like you have routed a channel on the back of a solid body and glued in the neck. Did you: a) Make a neck through with wings and glue on a quilted maple cap. If so, how thick is your cap. I guess 1/4" is probably the standard. or Make a solid body and then route out a channel in the back to accept the neck. If so, did you have to route the top of the neck wood to make sure that the fretboard was high enough above the top? Keep up the good work, and keep the pictures rolling in! Mike

Hey, I was looking at building a Hofner-esque bass at one time and did a huge search for plans. I didn't come up with any plans, but I found quite a few links that gave me an idea of how they were made. The only two that I went back to repeatedly were: This one that actually gives a brief factory tour. This is definitely the best source I've found. http://www.voxshowroom.com/northcoast/hofn...tour/index.html This page has a lot of pictures of various versions that might be helpful: http://www.hillmanweb.com/hillgt11.html I still haven't decided if I'm going through with the Hofner build or if another guitar is next. But post anything that you find, especially plans, I'd love to see those. Hope that helps. Mike

Hey PSW, Sounds Great! I'm jealous of those harmonics. I should post some clips of my setup, because just from the quick listen that I gave, it sounds like my driver (the ferrite/rare earth one) is a little better at grabbing the root note and holding it without harmonics. But like I said in the other thread, I get NONE of those cool harmonics that you're getting on the upper strings. Those clips were great to demonstrate how versatile this thing can be. Really great stuff! Thanks for all your efforts, keep it up! Mike

Hey PSW, That's funny, because I was just about to post that I have been really impressed with the battery life of my sustainer. Maybe I don't put as much playing time on it as you. I guess I should put in a freshly charged battery and let it run until it dies for a good test. Anyway, I played around with the sustainer last night, and I have another mystery for everyone to think about. As I said, my new ferrite/rare earth driver works very, very well. But that is "normal" mode, I hadn't tried harmonic until yesterday. And strangely, I get almost NOTHING in harmonic mode. It just kind of kills the note and certainly doesn't sustain the harmonic like my last tall coil did. I found this interesting. So in short, what I have is excellent for sustaining the root, but really horrible in harmonic mode. Bring on the crazy theories! My theory is that my sustainer has a really strong magnetic field. This means that it is very good at reinforcing the vibrating string when in phase. However, in harmonic mode my other drivers have had just enough strength to force a node in the vibrating string, thereby inducing harmonics. Maybe this new driver is so strong or the field is so spread out that it actually stops the string instead of just giving a nicely defined node (null). Just a theory. I don't know, but this thing is fun. Mike

Report: I finished my new driver. It looks almost exactly like the one in the tutorial, but this one has a ferrite core, exactly 8.0 ohms of 28 gauge wire, and rare earth magnets below. It works like a dream. As I said earlier, I had a driver made from the pickup of my test guitar in there for a while and got nothing on the higher strings. I thought this might be due to a weak magnet and a tall coil, so I made this new one. The new one gives me sustain on every fret of every string if I toy around with the preamp gain. This is the first time that I've had any sustain on the B and E strings, so I'm pretty excited. This once again shows how important the driver is, because I only changed the driver and it made a HUGE difference. PSW, you asked about the core: I took a ferrite rod about 1/2" in diamter and grinded down three sides so the cross section looks like a square with one side rounded. Then I just did the usual bobbin from plastic epoxied to the ferrite with the coil wrapped on it. The magnets are rectangular rare earth magnets from ebay, with one magnet on the bass side and two magnets on the treble side. This seems to work really well. PSW, good work on incorporating the circuit in that guitar. Your circuit is much smaller than mine. Mine barely fits in the cavity of my Ibanez, which is pretty big. Keep the research coming. Maybe I'll get some pictures of my driver up soon to try to inspire more people to join in. Mike

The title pretty much says it all. I've done some searching and was kind of shocked that I didn't find a good schematic. I saw a couple that were just FM transmitters, but how is the fidelity on those compared to the professional systems? And interference seems like a big problem (I guess this depends on the frequency range). Anyone know of a good homemade solution, or a reason why it's too complicated for the average builder? It seems like there should be a simple IC designed for this kind of thing. Thanks, Mike

That Tele is beautiful! Great work! I also enjoyed the variety of instruments in this one.

Hey, I've been out of town and I just got caught up on what's happening in the sustainer thread. Reading this thing is full time job. Anyway, just wanted to post that I'm working on a new driver and hopefully I'll have pics to share in a week or so when I stop travelling. Nothing special, just a short coil with a ferrite core (which I haven't tried yet) and hopefully some really strong magnets. Everybody keep it up! It's great to see this discussion. Mike.

Pekko, I would definitely try making another driver. As I said, I really don't like the performance of my new setup, and the only thing that changed was the driver. I have two suspects in the poor driver case: 1) The first driver was short and wide, the second was tall and thin. 2) The first driver had rare earth magnets, the second had ceramic. So one of these things is probably the problem. Anyway, I just wanted to say that the driver that I show in my tutorial worked MUCH better than what you or I are seeing right now, so don't be discouraged. I was never 100% sure until this last round of testing that I did, but I'm starting to side with PSW in saying that the driver design is the biggest piece of the puzzle. I always thought that frequency response of the circuit and all that stuff would be paramount, but now I'm thinking it's driver design all the way. Keep it up! Mike.

Hey Guys, I've been out of town for the last week so I just got caught up on all the news on this thread. So PSW, the original opamp preamp I was using was this one: I can't remember where I downloaded it from, so I can't give the proper credit, but it was one of the well-known guitar effects sites. I never got any kind of great operation with this preamp and I found that the Fetzer valve worked MUCH better. As always, I could have had something wrong. In case you can't read the values, the resistors are 220k and 100k, and the caps are 1uF, 15uF, and 22uF. My spare time has been spent making a guitar from junk parts with a built in sustainer. I made the driver from the neck pickup of the guitar (some type of Ibanez) and so it looks like a stock guitar, which I think is really cool. This coil is much taller and thinner than my other drivers. Anyway, I just finished it last night and the sustainer works better than any other prototype on the bass strings (EAD), but I get next to nothing on the other strings. I'll probably try reducing the output cap on the Ruby like you suggested, PSW, but other than that I might just have to go back to my slightly uglier early driver. Even though this one only works well for bass strings, though, it is really nice having a guitar with all the electronics built in so that I can play the guitar without wires hanging all over. No problems fitting everything into the rear cavity, either. That's my update, everyone keep the news coming in. I'm gonna try out my old driver and compare it to the new driver and hopefully have a report from that. Mike.

I just wanted to check in and say that it's great to see people working on this thread so vigorously again. PSW: As LK mentioned, I've been using the Ruby with a Fetzer valve preamp. For a while I was using a simple opamp preamp which worked pretty well, but when I went from breadboard to perfboard (right before writing the tutorial) I decided to try the Fetzer because it's already documented. I'm happy with the switch. Having said that, I'm sure that our electronic experts like LK and Ansil can improve on the electronics of this thing. I think the biggest issue to tackle is the high frequency response. It's very easy to build this thing and get a great sustainer, but in my experience it's difficult to get the high E going. I'm going to try a new driver with a ferrite core to see if that helps. Anyway, keep it up everyone! Mike

Yeah, I meant neck pickup. I made that mistake about six times in the same paragraph without noticing somehow. It's been corrected now. Thanks for the heads up. Mike

SUSTAINER TUTORIAL POSTED! I just wrote up a tutorial with pictures on how I made my sustainer: http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic=16984 As I said in the tutorial, this is certainly NOT written up to say "we did it and here's how to build it", it's more meant to say "here's an easy way to build it so everyone can start improving on it". So let's see some working sustainers out there, and everyone report in on how their experimenting goes. Thanks PSW, thanks lovekraft, and thanks everyone who has added to this stuff. Let me know if you think I should change anything in the tutorial or if anything is unclear. Let's keep this thing going. Personally, I'm going the PSW route and I'm going to start integrating this into a guitar. I'll check in and report as I find out more about this sustainer beast. Mike.

This is intended to be an organized description of how I built a guitar sustainer that infinitely sustains the vibration of the string (at least until the battery runs out). If you are interested in sustainer theory, just about any aspect of it has been discussed on the thread that this tutorial was born from: PSW's Sustainer Thread Disclaimer #1: This is not even close to a solo effort on my part. As anyone who read the original thread knows, PSW Pete is really the driving force behind all of this. Endless thanks and all the credit for this project go to him. And there have certainly been a lot of players along the way that contributed a lot (lovekraft, biohazard, onelastgoodbye, and too many others to mention) So thanks to everyone. Disclaimer #2: I'm just a guy who came along and wanted to organize everything and get an established point for people to be on the same page so that the design can be refined. In short, this is just a starting point for more experimentation to take place with the driver and circuit design. The system I have built works really well, but it does not do well to sustain the high E string and has a little trouble with the B as well. Hopefully this tutorial will motivate some people to build sustainers and give some input on how to improve on this design. General Overview: The chart below illustrates the general signal flow of the sustainer system. The signal is taken from the bridge pickup, amplified through a preamp/poweramp circuit, and fed into a driver, which is essentially a pickup wired to only 8 Ohms, or a speaker with no cone, however you want to think about it. The general idea is that the signal from the guitar is amplified and the driver is used to send an electromagnetic field that will reinforce the vibration, and on and on the sustain goes until you stop it. As you can see, there are only two things to really build here, an amplifier and a driver. I used a common circuit for the amplifier and the driver is simple enough to build, so this really is not too challenging for the solder-competent builder. Amplifier: The guys over at runoffgroove.com have a circuit for a small 386-based amplifier called the Ruby which is very well suited to our needs here. I built this and found that it worked great with hot pickups but did not have enough gain for lower-output pickups. Fortunately, they also have a preamp design called the Fetzer valve which is enough of a preamp to get sustain with about any pickup I've tried. The schematic is given below, and more info and troubleshooting tips can be found in the forum at runoffgroove. Thanks to runoffgroove for allowing the use of this circuit in this tutorial. The only difference here is that our "speaker" will be our driver, which is discussed next. Driver: The driver took me a couple of hours to wind and is probably the most labor intensive part of this build. Still, it's really not too difficult. My driver was built from a stainless steel bar that originall measured 6.2x6.2x61mm as the core. I rounded the edges of this so the corners wouldn't hurt the wrapping wire. I then cut two bobbin pieces (top and bottom) from the black plastic from the back of a CD case. Just cut them in a pickup shape as you can see in the pictures below, then cut out a little rectangle in the middle for the steel bar to poke through. The steel bar and the bobbin top and bottom are then all epoxied together to make the bobbin structure on which the wire is wound. I used 30AWG wrapping wire from Radio Shack for the windings. I squeezed some Elmer's glue all in the bobbin and then started wrapping the wire, keeping it tight. The glue squeezes up through the windings as you proceed and this hopefully pots the driver and avoids squealing. Just wrap it until you get around 8 Ohms, and then solder some wire on to the ends of the wrapped wire. I epoxied this connection into the bobbin, too, just so that the wrapping wire does not flex too much and break. After you have the winding, just stick a magnet on one side of the steel rod. I used some rare earth magnets that I salvaged out of an old hard drive. This is another issue to investigate: which magnet type is best? Mine were kind of strange because they had N and S on the same side and so I had to make sure that only the proper side of each magnet contacted the steel. Speaking of "proper" side of the magnet, there are two ways that this sustainer thing can run. In one mode it will be in phase and keep the dominant mode on the string alive (infinite sustain). In the other mode it will try to cancel out the main mode and kick up some harmonics in the string. This is a cool effect. To switch between these two modes, either switch the lead wires of the driver (essentially change the direction of current in the coil), or flip over your magnet. The best way to handle this is probably to use a DPDT switch to be able to switch the driver leads easily. This way you can flip from regular to harmonic mode with no hassles. That's pretty much it for the driver. About an hour to make the bobbin, and about an hour to wrap the wire. Let the glue dry, and you're ready to sustain! General Comments: 1. My current (temporary) setup is to tape the driver under the strings of a guitar with no neck pickup. I always got a little bit of feedback when I tried to use the driver held over the strings of a guitar with a neck pickup. My electromagnetic interference classes make me want to say that the driver signal is coupling through the pickup winding and ground connections even if the neck pickup is not selected. Anyway, the ideal situation is not to have a neck pickup at all, but at least make sure that you do NOT have the neck pickup on (selected). More people might be able to elaborate on this, but that's my experience. I know that PSW tried a combination driver/neck pickup, so he would know more than I would. 2. The way that I play it is to pick normally and solo for a bit. Then I hit the note that I want to sustain, and adjust the preamp gain until it has the right amount of power to keep the string going. Too little power and the string dies out eventually, too much power and the string kind of goes into a square wave and sounds a bit distorted. So I pick and then start sustaining a note and make little adjustments to the preamp level as I play. On my setup chords actually work really nicely too. I was surprised by this. 3. I haven't done it, but it seems easy enough to take the output after the Fetzer valve and have an onboard boost. Kind of a byproduct of the sustainer. Just a thought. 4. As I mentioned, my setup works great but has difficulty keeping the B and high E strings going. The discussion on the other thread mentioned things like the frequency being too high and the strings not having enough physical material for the field to act on. Just some things to think about as everyone builds these things and improves on it (which I know you guys will do). Pictures: Hopefully I've described it well enough for someone to replicate this, but here are some pictures of my test setup in case anything was not clear enough. I may even get some sound clips up later to give everyone an idea of what these things can do. Thanks again to everyone that contributed to this work!

Alright folks, I think that I have a simple formula to make a sustainer now. I made another circuit, it works much better. My first circuit would only give good sustain with hot humbuckers, but this second circuit has enough preamp gain to work with just about any guitar. I'd like to write up a quick tutorial on how to make this thing that includes the schematic, the steps for making the driver, and maybe some sound samples. So could I write this for the projectguitar tutorials page? I'm not sure if that priveledge is reserved for the "senior" members. Let me just say that this thing is easy to build and FUN to play with, so I'm sure a lot of people would want to build this. It took me about an hour to build the circuit, 1-2 hours to make the driver, and about half an hour of circuit debugging (stupid mistake). The system I have now is really controllable and I get a nice infinite sustain on every string but the high E. Once again, the high E issue may also be the guitar I've been using. The sustain sounds pretty cool with a clean guitar tone, too. Anyway, if anyone could let me know the rules on tutorials I'd appreciate it. I'll try to get this info out ASAP whenever I know what to do. Thanks again to everyone, especially PSW. Mike

UPDATE: WORKING SUSTAINER! So I wound a new driver and wired up a simple opamp preamp. The new driver uses rare earth magnets that I took out of a hard drive. I slipped it under the strings of one of my guitars, and it works like a dream! With one exception: The 386 seems to give out in intervals. I pluck the string, it goes into a beautiful sustain, it builds up to a level and then the Ruby circuit cuts out and the string dies down a bit, then the Ruby kicks back in and it starts building back up. This is about a 8 second cycle with 5 seconds of great sustaining and 3-4 seconds of cutting out. I'm gonna try replacing the 386 chip and hopefully that will fix it. If this small glitch is worked out this will be an excellent system! I went all over the fretboard and every string held excellent infinite sustain except for the high E. The guitar I'm trying has a bit of a quite high E due to pickup alignment, thought, so that may be the problem. But seriously, when the Ruby is working it is flawless. I love it. I was just touching the string without picking and the sustain would kick in and I could slide it all around. Any suggestions on the cutting out problem would be really appreciated. As soon as I work out that bug I'm planning on posting schematics, driver winding instructions, and sound clips. I really think this is something that anyone with any soldering capability can easily do. Thanks again to PSW and everyone else that has contributed to this. Let's keep it rolling, it's almost there. Mike.