jnewman

Actually, we are talking about the frequency. A given note corresponds to a specific frequency. The low E on a bass is 41.2 Hz. For the low E string to have the pitch E, it must vibrate at 41.2Hz. For a given type/thickness of string, with a given distance between the nut and saddle, that requires a specific tension.

The entire string length is what matters. Hence the reverse headstock, why Hendrix could bend his ass off on the upside down strats, etc. It's arguable that it makes a difference for bending. Physics does back that up, but even then, you have it backwards - it's easier to bend a string which has more length past the nut, not harder (well, you have to bring the string up to the same tension regardless, but with more string past the nut, you have to bend it farther and it's easier per distance so it "feels" easier). Hendrix could bend his ass off on upside down strats because he was an amazing guitarist, not because the strat was upside down . It's also arguable that it could make the playing feel different. However, it's pretty hard to argue that it will change the actual tension of the string. The frequency of an oscillating, elastic string (i.e. a guitar or bass string) depends on the length of the oscillating string (the length that actually oscillates, i.e. saddle to nut), the mass of the string, the elastic coefficient of the string, and the tension of the string. For a given string type and scale length, there is ONE tension which achieves a certain frequency oscillation - it doesn't matter how much string there is past the nut.

How will it up the tension? The distance between the bridge and nut is still the same.

It's a lot but it could be done by someone that cared enough. Seems like a lot of trouble to me personally . You'd probably just need to just buy an LED tuner and take it apart and mount it. For a real 3-band eq, you'd need an active preamp (which you can use with passive pickups). I think the "adjust volume knob between two pickups" thing you'd want would be a blend pot. This is a special kind of dual pot. It has a center detent at which both pickups are at 100% volume. To the left of the detent, one pickup fades to zero (over the whole sweep) while the other stays at 100%. To the right of the detent, it works the opposite way - the first pickup stays at 100% while the second fades to 0 (over the whole sweep). You can find schematics for headphone guitar amps around that are based on FETs or opamps. The Ruby amplifier is one.

A quick question on your headstock: have you made sure that all the runs from tuner to nut are clear? It looks like some of the tuner holes may end up in the way of the strings going from other tuners to the nut. It is starting to look really good, though.

It shouldn't cause any problems.

Yeah, all else being equal, ceramic magnets will cause higher output, but that's not what the resistance of the pickup is. The resistance of the pickup is PURELY the DC resistance (I guess it might be the complex impedance, but still) of the wire on the coil, and is not a measure of output, pickup strength, or anything else. It's just a measure of the DC resistance of the coil. It depends on the length of wire used and the type of wire used, but not on the magnets.

There are parts of guitar building where it is REALLY handy to have a plunge router - for example doing the pickup and control cavity routes. There are other parts where you can do just fine with a fixed router - like the neck pocket and body outline/roundovers. It's good to have both bases handy, but not wholly necessary. If I HAD to pick one, I'd get a plunge router, but my router is a kit with both bases. I'm not a big fan of the space alien aesthetic of that Hitachi router, but it has been getting pretty good reviews from most of the woodworking magazines that have tried it since it came out a year or two ago. I just took a look at the Taunton's 2007 Tool Guide (Fine Woodworking mag and Fine Homebuilding mag) and they have it rated pretty well. Another option is the Skil 1825, which they give the best value award to - it's not rated as well for ease of base changes or router table suitability, but it rates as well on plunge-base score and actually even better on the fixed base score. They show the Hitachi with a street price of $180 and the Skil with a street price of $100. Both are 2 1/4HP routers. I really like Bosch jigsaw blades. Bosch recommends their U101AO Clean for Wood blades for curved cuts, but the blade length isn't really long enough to cut a 1 3/4 in body blank. I might try the U101DF Clean for Hardwood blades, they're long enough to cut a thick blank. I normally use the Precision for Wood blades, but those are only available for T-shank blades, not U-shank blades.

To bypass the MV there, you would also have to disconnect the ground from the grounded lug.

Bosch calls it a palm router, I think, but its size, power, and features are pretty much par for the course for professional laminate trimmers, although it ranks near the top for power and features. I think a laminate trimmer is pretty much defined by: You hold it by the motor housing, not handles. A 1/4" collet. A small fixed-router style base. Power around 1HP or less.

A humbucker is two coils wired in series, which means you get the sum of the outputs of the two coils (so twice the output of one of the coils). Positions two and four on a strat are two coils wired in parallel, which means (essentially) that you get the average of the outputs of the two coils - there's not an increase in output over a single coil by itself. If you keep them in parallel like a strat is wired, you'll never have anything close to a humbucker. If you wire them in series, that'll at least get you closer and will make a lot bigger difference than how close together the coils are. The hum-canceling effect has very little to do with the distance between the two coils. If you have a strat that hums a lot in positions 2 and 4, either there's a problem with your wiring, your pickups have significantly different output levels (number of windings), or the control cavities and wire runs are not shielded.

There are plenty of external preamps available... in a sense, pretty much any active volume/distortion/fuzz/drive/boost pedal is a preamp (with some other stuff added). If you're worried about an internal preamp messing with your tone, you can always wire it with a bypass switch. I wouldn't worry too much about it though - this is almost the ideal application for a small signal preamplifier. A well-designed preamp shouldn't color your tone at all - they're accurate enough that you can use them in high-quality audio apps, so I can't see it doing too much damage to a guitar signal. How much a potentiometer loads down your output signal is purely based on its resistance, so it doesn't matter if the pot is a single, part of a push-pull, or half of a concentric pot. There is no electrical connection between the pot in a push-pull and the switch or between one pot and the other on a concentric pot. Using a push-pull or concentric pot is exactly the same as using a normal one, assuming the pots are the same value (plus you get to use the other part, be it switch or pot, for something else). Using a higher-value pot as your volume pot than normal will cause less load on the pickups output, but it'll still be less than if you use a no-load pot as detailed above. What do you mean by blend/tone pot? Normally, a blend pot would be a special dual pot that takes two inputs and mixes them at different levels. You can not get a blend pot plus something else in a concentric pot format. Also, you're talking about a lot of switches and options, but you haven't provided for any pickup combinations - you would only be able to use one pickup at a time but each pickup would have a ton of controls. My experience is that a lot of people who are new at modifying their guitar's electronics decide that they want a million different switching options and controls, and then end up using only a couple of them. There are people around who use all fifteen switched and ten knobs on their guitars on a regular basis, but there aren't very many .

It's possible you made a bandpass filter accidentally which could sound vaguely like modulation, or that your values are a little different and just sound different from a normal tone control. Can you post pictures or a schematic of what you did?

You could buy banjo tuners. Of course, they're only a 4:1 ratio, while guitar tuners are usually 12:1 or 16:1 or in that range.

I can draw it out for you later, I just have an exam tonight so I don't have time right now .

If you haven't been there, you might check out www.guitarnuts.com. It has quite a few wiring diagrams for Stratocaster style guitars. You'll need to click "wiring," then "modifications." You can indeed do out of phase/in phase with the single coils and a DPDT. If it were me trying to do it, I would just have one DPDT swap either the neck pickup (if you only want out of phase with neck+middle) or the middle pickup (if you want out of phase with both combo positions) from hooked up the right way to hooked up backwards. You would do this by hooking up the hot and ground leads up one way to one throw of the switch and the opposite way to the other throw of the switch, then taking the wires from the poles and using them as the hot and ground leads that go to the volume controls. You might consider using a push-pull pot for this application, which is a DPDT switch attached to a potentiometer. You could replace the volume pot with this, and have in-phase with the knob pushed in and out-of-phase with the knob pulled out. Please note that if you do this with NON-noisefree pickups, the combination positions when out of phase will no longer be hum-cancelling.

I can't comment on the Fender SCN pickups, except to say that some people like them and some people don't like them. Apparently they sound fairly different from a normal single coil. I have a Fender Texas Special Strat, which has two Texas Special single coils (little hotter than normal single coils) and a PG+ in the bridge. I think the PG+ is a very good pickup. The only problem is that with a humbucker and two single coils, there is a big volume jump from the single coils to the humbucker. I have worked around this to some degree by moving the sc's closer to the strings and the HB pretty far away from them. The PG+ is sort of a hot PAF kind of pickup. It sounds nice. What are you planning on using the two DPDT switches for?

I've more or less said it before, and I'll say it again now: Your guitars, more than anyone else's, make me actually want to pony up for a custom guitar. Every one of 'em that I've seen pictures of has looked absolutely fantastic.

There are two general categories of pickups, labeled "active" and "passive." "Active" pickups have a very low output level and REQUIRE a preamplifier to give them the juice to make it to the amp at any volume. "Passive" pickups have a lot more of the bit that actually picks up the signal, so they have a higher output, which can go directly to the amp without a preamplifier. However, you can also use a preamplifier with "passive" pickups, you just don't have to. To recap: You can use a preamplifier with ANY pickups, but active pickups actually require one. One big "problem" with "passive" pickups is that while they supply plenty of voltage for the signal, they have a high output impedance (meaning they aren't very good at driving a load). As a result, every path to ground (which includes volume and treble controls) and long cable run (like a guitar cable more than 10' long) actually loads down the output and decreases the voltage that gets to the amp. Another "problem" is that as we discussed, with passive electronics you can only get rid of some signal, you can't add to it. A preamplifier in its simplest form is just a voltage follower. This is a device which takes a voltage input, and outputs that same voltage (and so is sometimes called a unity-gain preamplifer or buffer - its gain, the ratio of output voltage to input voltage, is one) - but it does so with a much lower output impedance, which means that it can drive a load better so little of the signal is lost to controls and long cables. The next step is to make your preamplifier variable gain. This lets you set the output level of your preamplifier at some constant multiple of the input level (it may be more or less than the input, in the context of guitar electronics it's almost always more than). This is kind of useful for some things, but if you refine it a little more, you can make your preamplifier have gain that varies with frequency - i.e. you can make a control or controls which make your preamplifier amplify or cut some part(s) of the frequency spectrum more than others. This is what is really useful. You can also build effects into your guitar's electronics, but I personally think those are a little silly . It is certainly possible to build your own preamplifier, but it is not a trivial task and for the amount of time it would take to learn the stuff if you don't already know it you might as well go ahead and buy one if it's what you want.

In a guitar, if you don't have batteries, there are no active tone controls, period. What that means is that any tone control can only decrease amplitude of certain frequencies, never increase them. A normal tone control actually works by shunting some of the high frequencies to ground (treble cut). This is a low-pass filter and works by having the input signal go through a resistor (the tone pot) then has signal out with a capacitor to ground. You can make a tone control which shunts low frequencies to ground (bass cut), a high-pass filter, by reversing the position of the cap and resistor - you would have the input signal go through a resistor, then have your output signal and a resistor to ground. I've never tried this in the context of guitar wiring, although it's common in other areas of electronics. The same values you use for a normal tone control may or may not work.

I've seen plenty of joins where I can see the grain shift along a line but can't make out any type of gap. Maybe I could if I had a microscope or something.

If you take a pot apart and scrape the conductive material off of the end of the pot's sweep furthest from the ground connection, then you've created an essentially no-load pot and don't need a bypass switch. I mean, sure, with it all the way open you'll add an ohm or two between your pickup hot line and the jack (as would a bypass switch), but you won't have the 250K or 500K to ground anymore, which is what really loads the guitar's output. But yeah, a TBX control is already a dual pot, as is a concentric pot. So you can't really have a concentric pot with, for example, volume and TBX. I mean, you could, but I've never seen a concentric single/dual pot. I guess you could make one from a concentric and stacked pot, but you'd have to fabricate parts and like biliousfrog said it would be pretty thick.

I have spent a fair bit of time recently on www.18watt.com, which seems to me to be a great amp building forum. I've built a few amps lately, but not enough to give you an opinion out of my own experience. However, the general opinion I have seen expressed over there is that there are some differences in sound between the different types (generally recently made amps use either Sprague Orange Drops or Mallory 150 caps, which are both about the same price and pretty cheap. Fenders have almost always used Orange Drops, Marshalls a long time ago used Mullard "mustard" caps, more recently have used Mallory 150's. Some people use a repro "mustard" cap made by SoZo.). Apparently, though, the coupling caps between stages make at least as much difference as the tone stack caps do (these are also usually Orange Drops or M150's or the "mustard" caps). A vacuum tube amplifies an AC signal but there's also a large DC voltage on the output which must be removed before the next stage, so there are caps between each tube stage, and these are the coupling capacitors. I've also seen the general opinion that the electrolytics used in the power supply and as cathode caps make no difference in sound. With that said, there are a few people over there who have used super-fancy caps (like Hovland Musicaps, or Auricaps, or the Cardas Golden Ratio caps, etc.) but most of the people who build a lot of amps say it's not worth the cost. I do know plenty of stereo amp builders who use the super-fancy ones. Some of them say that they sound better, and some of them say it just lets them charge people twice as much. Of course, there are also some audiophiles who spend $500 or more on a power cable with solid silver 14ga conductors.

Ewwwww . I mean, it's very impressive as inlaid art, but man that's gaudy.

You can't post pictures directly to the forum. If you want to post pictures, you'll need a (free) account at an online picture hosting service like www.photobucket.com or www.flickr.com. I haven't used flickr before, with photobucket after you upload your photos it gives you several addresses for the pictures. One of the addresses has an tag in front of it. If you copy and paste that into your post, it will show up in your post.