david.allgayer

Ceramic caps are pretty cheap, and even film caps shouldn't be much more than a quarter apiece, so that shouldn't be a problem - the big expense is going to be the inductor, unless you've already found one. You can use small telecom or modem transformers as inductors and get good results if you're clever - Torres has been doing it for years. If you're looking for more audio quality, Opamp Labs offers a multi-tap inductor for about $10.00 that should keep you busy from now on.  The possibilities are staggering, limited only by your switching (well, not exactly, but with 5 caps, that's 45 possibilities - the mind boggles!!).

FWIW, 'regular" varitones generally use a 1.5H inductor and caps in a range between .001uF and .1uF.  thedoctor makes a good point in that the impedance of the pickups and the volume and tone controls will interact with the varitone somewhat, although the effect will not be massive, but there will probably be some minor tweaking necessary to find the "sweet spot" for any given setup. Of course, if you slap an active buffer in front of it, and buffer the output, you've got a stable unit that sounds the same in any application (but that's another project  ).

If you'd like to play around with it without investing too much, you can use a Mouser TL024 transformer (about $1.50 - the primary is about 1.5H, so just clip and tape off the secondary wires), and an assortment of ceramic or film caps to get started with, and throw in a Lorlin 12 position rotary switch when you've narrowed down the choices a bit!  Have fun!!

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Wicked! Thanks for all the tips. Just gotta make this work now

Nice idea! Thanks doctor!

Well, Actually I didn't quite know what I meant, but it's clearer now, it's definitely parallel... Gotta read some electronics for dummies or somesuch guide though first I think By the way, can anybody tell me if there's like a chart that tells you what kind of capacitor gives what kind of sound or is that just something you figure out after installing the varitone?

Wow, that is pretty cool!

I thought the only thing I could do was put them in series, but one on each pickup or in parallel, now that is nice.

So, the original Gibson one on my Blues Hawk affects bot pickups, so I'd have to get it rewired to separate them out and put one varitone on each pickup, right?

My aim is to increase the number of tonal variations I can get out of the guitar though, so one on each pickup wasn't what I had in mind, but more like both on both pickups so I can add both effects on both pickups in any position of the selector.

Now, if I have two varitones in series, I can put one on bypass and just get the effect of the original varitone. I think I need to have a chat with bigDguitars to find out exactly what to do, and also with a luthier to see if I could even pay for the mod...

Hi,

I recently found out that it is possible to buy hand-made varitones for not too much money via ebay and other websites.

This got me to thinking about installing one on my Gibson Blues Hawk. Now, the Gibson Blues Hawk already has a varitone installed originally, so I was wondering if anybody could tell me (or hasard a guess) at what would happend if I installed a second one?

Could I add the effects? Would it just ruin the sound?

I don't want to install it and then find out it doesn't work, so any guesses you can give me are welcome.