lovekraft

The righthand diagram is correct - the other one doesn't really work, for obvious reasons, and probably just acts as an antenna for noise.

I hate to bust anybody's bubble, but Orange Drops first came to prominence in the mid 70s as replacement caps for real vintage amps - AFAIK, their use in guitars began with all the crossover mojo and misinformation that was marketed in the 80s. If you want vintage vibe, you're going to have to do better than that, like some real bumblebees or black cats, or those cool old oil and foil waxed caps - good luck finding the real thing for less than a small fortune. Use whatever you like, but keep in mind that using a 630V cap in a guitar tends to reflect on the judgement of the builder and/or the buyer, at least for some of us! To each his own, I suppose!

Not quite, but it's almost that simple. Simply take a DPDT On-On-On toggle switch, orient it so the lugs are in two horizontal lines, wire the leftmost two lugs to one pickup, the rightmost pair to the other, and the center pair to the output. Holler if that's not clear enough, and I can draw it up for you.

There shouldn't be a 1uF@400V cap anywhere in an unmodified 6G15: http://www.schematicheaven.com/fenderamps/..._6g15_schem.pdf There's a pair of .1uF caps in the original (output coupling caps), just like in the reissue. Out of curiosity, why are you replacing these caps if they're not electrolytics?

If I ever start feeling comfortable with working on a live amp, I'm going to retire! Seriously, a bunch of my associates and I discussed this at length over drinks a few years back, and decided it's probably fairly difficult to kill oneself accidentally with a live tube amp, but since death is a permanent, non-negotiable state, we concluded that it's better not to take any chances. The only thing you have to have power to do is biasing the amp - all other work should be done with the switches off, the amp unplugged, and the caps drained, if possible.

OK, educate me, counsellor - why does a passive pickup need a load other than the amp? The very first component in Leo's amps is a great honkin' 1 Meg resistor shunted to ground (right across the input jack) - why does the pickup need another load? The only thing that adding a resistor in parallel with the amp's input load will do is cause a loss of highs due to the capacitance in the cable, and while that may be a good thing in some instances, it certainly doesn't qualify as a necessity. I'll see your Kirchoff, and raise you two Soldanos!

Stu Sutcliffe

+1 - in fact, on my dial-up connection, "1 meg flash file" might as well be "Go away!!", since I'm not going to wait for it to load under any circumstances. Besides, most Flash on the 'Net is just showing off anyway, and generally (IMHO) not worth the wait - dazzle me with content, not special effects. I'm sure my preferences don't reflect those of the majority of Internet users, but if this site is designed to sell guitars for you, I am fairly typical of the musicians that I know, especially the ones who can afford to buy a hand-built one-off guitar. Just my two cents, feel free to ignore any or all of this.

Just replace the jack - it's not worth worrying about when your "repair" is going to fail completely, leaving you without a guitar.

Remove all of your current electronics, buy a pair of 81s and follow the very detailed instructions included with them - the only potential problems are replacing the selector switch (a Tele switch will work great, or you can use the 5-way you have in a pinch) and finding a place for the battery. If you run into problems, I'm sure somebody around here can walk you through it.

1. Use either void-free plywood or solid wood. Early Fender cabinets are made from 1/2" (13mm) yellow pine, and sound great, but the industry standard is 3/4" (19mm) baltic birch plywood, 9 or 13 ply. 2. Without knowing the diameter, impedance and power level of your speaker, it's impossible to recommend a replacement. Keep in mind that a good bass speaker will probably cost double the new price of that amp. HTH

Greg's right - you can't just reverse the wires, because the signal will be out of phase - however, you can rotate either the magnet (if possible) or the whole pickup 180º (so the wires come out the other side) and reverse the wires, and it will work correctly. Ibanez used this trick on some of their guitars, apparently to avoid the cost of winding a special pickup.

Here: Copycarver™ Spend 20 bucks and get the answers to most of your questions.

Seriously, how difficult is that? Don't most guitarists at some point in the set have to step on a stompbox while switching pickups? This doesn't exactly require an advanced skillset - most of the guitarists I've played with manage it without issue, even when quite inebriated!

Yes, that will work. Now you're gilding the lily - it's an unnecessary complication, since both sources have their own volume controls, and it's not as simple as it sounds, because you're working with enough power to drive headphones, so just slapping a 500K pot in there won't get you where you want to go. Either make the basic dual mono to stereo adapter and control the volume from the input device, or follow Greg's advice and buy or build a proper mixer/blender - there's really not a good in-between solution.

I don't know how things are now, but when I was a kid, most of us became musicians because we were, shall we say, less than stellar athletes, and found an alternative method for attracting adoring females. All seriousness aside, the two lifestyles are very nearly mutually exclusive - it's gotta be tough to spend 3 hours after school at football practice, come home and do home work, and still find the time to practice arpeggios and scales for a couple of hours. The level of commitment necessary to be even competent in either pursuit is quite high, and even without a social life, it's still difficult to "serve two mistresses" without neglecting one (or both). Perhaps it's easier now - the average skill level needed to play popular music has certainly declined steeply since the late 80s, and leaping has become a lot more important than having even basic chops, so maybe more hardcore jocks are finding time to play in garage bands.

Unless you're really adept at noise isolation and troubleshooting, I'd avoid those 12 volt neons - the switching power supply can wreak havoc with your signal chain.

This is one of those, "What's better, strawberry or chocolate?" questions - unless those DeArmonds don't sound good with the stock caps, there's no reason to change them (IMHO). If you're dead set on changing them, try buying a couple that are double the current value and a pair that are half that value, try 'em all, and use the ones you like best (caps are cheap). You could add a preamp. However, you'll likely lose the sweet vintage sound associated with those old DeArmonds. They're never going to be screamers, even with massive preamplification, but that's not what they're designed for.

Aw, c'mon!! Even if you don't like orange, it's gotta be better than another (yawn) unauthorized EVH clone!! How 'bout pearl white, but with old school 4-color hotrod flames?

OK, I'm sure that there's a physics major or two around here that can correct this if I get it wrong, so here goes - in a cap, the electrical charge is mostly stored at the junction surface between the dielectric and the conductor, and is released when the cap is discharged. In electrolytics, some of the charge "leaks" into the dielectric material, and since the surface has the same charge, it repels the charge that's in the dielectric material so it can't escape. but when the cap is discharged, the barrier is removed, and the trapped charge can migrate to the surface, effectively recharging the cap. Anyway, that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it! The oldtimers I remember (from the days when one could actually repair electronic equipment) used to tell war stories about old CRTs that held kilovolts of power for literally years even after being discharged, just waiting to bite the unwary, but I'm much too young to remember any of that stuff. I'm sure I screwed at least some part of that up, but I'm sure that any gross errors or omissions will be corrected in due time.

The ZW diagram shows standard LP wiring, which does not include independent volume and tone pots - if you want them independent, wire it as per the 81/85 diagram.

Candy Sunset Orange sunburst, with matching headstock!!

I've never seen a bad cathode bypass cap cause oscillation, but that's no indication that it can't happen. Subsonic oscillations are almost always power supply related (IME), usually from insufficient isolation between the stages, so the filter caps are the first thing to check, since they are subject to fail over time anyhow. A test cap with alligator clips is a really good idea so long as you're very careful about keeping it discharged when it's not being used (remember, electrolytics have a nasty habit of "recharging" themselves when they're out of the circuit - dielectric adsorption, or something like that). Since this is a production amp with no well-documented issues, it's unlikely that there's a layout problem, or any other construction related failure, so the caps are the prime suspects, at least from where I'm sitting. Doesn't IOW stand for in other words?

For a quick diagnostic test, simply remove one of the pickups from the guitar completely, wire it directly to a jack and a battery, plug it into the amp and see if you can use it as a handheld microphone - if it isn't equally as microphonic when held firmly in your hand as it is in the guitar, it's not to blame in the guitar either. Other culprits might easily be the pickguard and/or mounting hardware, since any vibration in either will move the pickup in relation to the strings, causing microphonics. As for the ME-50, try turning down the volume on the guitar - EMGs put out a very healthy signal level, and the digital portions of the ME-50 may well be choking on the extra voltage, while the analog pedals probably handle overdrive much more gracefully. The ME-50 expects an input level of -10dBu, or about 250mV max, and probably wasn't designed to handle much over twice that, so the EMGs are probably overdriving the A/D converter and generating crappy digital distortion.

That's quite true, if we're talking about power schottkys - however, any small signal schottky that's suitable as a RF detector diode (BAT41 springs to mind, but there are literally hundreds of others) will exhibit a Vf similar to or lower than that of a germanium device. The point is that regardless of which device you choose, your pickups will have to produce a voltage swing well in excess of the forward voltage of the chosen diode for clipping to occur, and whether that Vf is 300mV or as low as 100mV, there aren't many pickups that will produce enough voltage swing to clip hard enough to impact the sound much except on the initial attack. You can always get around the problem by using a preamp to boost the pickup's output, but then you've built 75% of a DS-1, and it's silly not to just complete it and have a distortion box. Like Bob always said, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. We go through this same question cycle every few months, and never seem to come to any conclusions, so here's my final word on this: Lovekraft's Passive Clipper FAQ Q. Does the Black Ice/Strawberry Ice/passive diode clipper really work? A. Yes, to a limited degree. Q. Will it make my guitar sound like a tweed Fender? A. Probably not. It still might be a sound you like - the only way to find out is to try it. Q. Is it worth the trouble to try it? A. Well, since a pair of schottky or germanium diodes are fairly cheap, probably, especially if you keep your expectations low, and you have hot pickups. If you can't handle disappointment or view failure as an indication of lower self-worth, please avoid this project! Q. What's the easiest way for mw to find out if my setup will sound good with a Black Ice/Strawberry Ice/passive diode clipper installed? A. Try soldering a pair of anti-parallel diodes across your output jack temporarily - that will give you the sound of this unit wide open. If you like it, proceed to wire it in permanently with whatever pot and switching options you find useful. As always, YMMV!