Desjay

Are you talking about doing something like this? http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Bridges,_tailp...ng_Bridges.html

Boycott Monster Cable http://www.monstergreed.com/Index%20with%2...0about%20MC.htm

Wow Pete....... you've done your research You should definitely go to a music shop and let them let you try out an EBOW, you can get an open string vibrating so hard that it will bang against the frets, and even a pickup, if you have the pickup close enough, I swear it will have the string looking like it's a half inch wide (25.4mm) it's moving around so much, it's almost scary to touch the string when it gets going that strong because (to some who have done it) it almost gives you the sensation of touching an electric fence, because it's vibrating so hard. OH Well, I'll keep messing around here and let you know if I come up with anything, I don't want to derail the thread too much with my "I think this will work" posts Thanks again Pete

OK..... well shoot...... :/ Well, thanks for getting me excited about electronics again, I was really into it in the late 70's early 80's, making a lot of stuff from the Craig Anderton book, and even building a drum machine from a block diagram using CMOS 4017;s etc, (I used to have all the numbers memorized ) One project (The Craig Anderton Pre-Amp) ended up with me having a pretty wild looking guitar. Picture a plastic battery pack screwed to the front of the guitar that can hold 4 (or was it 6?) C Cells, the guitar Out Jack with a cord plugging BACK INTO a guitar Input jack in the pickguard, with another cable coming out of the pickguard going to an amp....yea, my guitar had 3 1/4' jacks on it, and I had a 6 foot length of cord just hanging from the guitar between the IN and OUT of the preamp. Don't know why I didn't mount it INSDE the guitar, considering it was an old Mustang shaped Silvertone that I carved into the shape of an SG with one of my Dad's Skinning Knives and a Hammer....all the Luthiers here just fainted LOL!!! What got me thinking of that approach was the proximity of the two coils inside the ebow, along with how small the coils themselves were. Well, I'll either experiment anyway with that approach (with several severe modifications, like using the LM386) or I might try two 'bars' (driver and Coil) placed near each other like the ebow. Either way, it'll be cheaper to experiment than to buy Five more Ebows My initial thought was that the circuit would need less "whatever" to get the string ringing because of the closeness of the two coils/drivers (whatever the official designation is)

Could he use something like a clock operating a 4016 quad analog switch to open and close the audio signal? I know Craig Anderton was using either the 4016 or 4066 to provide a tru digital bypass switching for an fx unit http://www.standardics.nxp.com/products/he...et/hef4016b.pdf

How's everybody doing? I'm new here, but I've been following this thread with a lot of interest, PSW, I've read 100+ pages of this thread, and man, I've got to say I feel like I've known you for a lifetime Anyway, PSW, you got me thinking (which, to some people who know me, is pretty dangerous) And I hope it's OK for me to post a different branching of the sustainer idea I've been working on in my head, and hope this won't be taken as a deconstruction of everything that's been covered so far. My idea, keeps obsessing me back to the original patent drawings of the E-Bow, along with some promising info from someone's website, that has participated in this thread, on his website he actually tears apart an Ebow, (kind of wish he had a heat gun to try and remove all that epoxy or whatever is covering the entire circuit board ) Anyways, he did take some good photos of the magnet/coil assemblies inside the Ebow and dammit, if they didn't almost look exactly like the size of those hearing aid/camera batteries So, I'm not sure how accurate patent drawing need to be, the patent itself was issued in 1975? IIRC, and the circuit looked like a basic 741 op-amp circuit to me, (I also don't know if the lm386 was out yet, and internet searches couldn't give me a year for the lm386) So, I decided to think my plan through with an op-amp My idea focuses on the OTHER part of the patent, the polyphonic Ebow, I found a place that sells any shape of magnet and any size here (this is the Ceramic Magnet selection page, they also have every other type also) http://www.magnetsource.com/Solutions_Page...SCSceramic.html Every diameter and height etc..... So I figure I could get the round ones, maybe .5 dia, and .25 height (maybe more) Glue some plastic discs on each end and wind up these mini-coils Kind of like a (I believe it was) Dan Armstrong Pickup, that had an individual Coil for each string (Someone correct me on that if I'm wrong) Now looking at the Ebow, the Driver and the other coil are in-line with the string they sit over and are probably .5 inch apart, so I'm thinking, why not replicate this 6 times, and put them under each string, inside a housing like a humbucker housing or Music Man housing or those other big honking pickups that go on a bass? Now....if the proximity of the driver and coil in the Ebow ALLOW the use of Op-Amps (not sure), then why not go with an LM324 Quad op-amp, and one more Dual op-amp from the same family, to save space? Then you would end up with a row of drivers and then a row of the other coils D D D D D D O O O O O O like that, each with their own circuit to drive each pair of driver and coil, which would/SHOULD allow polyphonic string feedbackage My OTHER thought, because PSW experimented with this already and mentioned the problem of once you bend the string, you move it out of the magnetic field, is 2 options 1. Maybe putting the assembly closer to the bridge where string bending won't be as extreme as it would be, if the units were placed near the neck....OR 2. instead of going with ROUND drivers and Coils, try Rectangular ones that "overlap" like this: Drivers and string number: .1..2..3..4..5..6 ___ ___ ___ ... ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ... ___ ___ ___ Same with the coils (Ignore the periods, I'm just using them to show the offset of the coils, the BB formats the stuff so they line up) So, the elongated coils and drivers that overlap will maybe keep the string ringing. now PSW you've also done quite a bit of research in the magnetism area, and I can't honestly say, if overlapping the drivers and coils would interfere with each other horribly or not, but maybe if they are staggered about .5 inches it might help? If someone would like to let me know if this branch is feasible by all means let me know, if anyone wants to completely blow it out of the water, well, again, let me know. I just feel there's an approachable solution to the (obviously unmarketable) device because EBOW already has it patented, and I honestly don't see why something like this couldn't be implemented. Power-wise I'm not sure, seeing as I use a Roland GK3 I've been hoping I could just tap off the 7 volts coming from that. (This would probably be easiest to implement on a guitar with a pickguard and the "Swimming pool" pickup routing)

Sorry, I hope I'm not considered spamming, because I posted this same post in the wrong section. Could a mod delete my htread in the Tutorial section? Hopefully I'm posting in the correct section now. OK, first off, Hi, I'm new here, but have been reading the forums for quite a while. Nice place! It's inspired me to try my hand at guitar building/modding. Having played guitar for 33 years now, I'd like to overcome the "Mysteries" of my favorite instrument and see if I can build/mod one for myself smile.gif I have 3 ESP F-50's (I'm in LOVE the body shape, especially the extra long horn on the top for balance reasons) Now they all have String through the body, over TOM bridge type deal. I'd like to upgrade one or all of these to the Ghost Graphtec Hex MIDI thing, because I use a VG8 and GR33, soon to be upgraded to a VG-99) According to the GraphTec website there's a slight issue with installing one of these systems on a guitar with string through the body, because of the difficulty of grounding the strings. Also, I personally HATE TOM's because of the lack of individual string height adjustment (I know there's a 3rd party bridge that let's you individually adjust string height on a TOM, but that option is out of the picture because the saddles would still get replaced by GrahTec saddles anyway) My question(s) is/are: Can I route the angle out of the neck pocket so the neck sits flat so the guitar would accomodate a flatmount bridge? There's plenty of thickness for the neck pocket, that I wouldn't have to worry about removing like an 1/8 to 1/4" to remove the Angle. Also, I would only be removing the wood towards the pocket closest to the body to remove/reduce the neck angle. I might also have to route a bit of wood off the neck under where the fingerboard overlaps the neck pocket, maybe 1/8" at the most. Second question: Would removing the angle affect the Scale of the guitar a bit? (Although that problem would be taken care of by mounting the flatmount bridge to compensate for any loss of scale) The holes/ferrules left by the String-thru-body wouldn't be a problem either, because I'm thinking of doing something like putting fiber optics in the holes and lighting them with an LED, or going REALLY crazy and doing a mod I found on the boards of wiring the strings and frets as pseudo-switches that would light each LED depending on what string I was fretting Any help/opinions appreciated

Make a guitar out of it, like the one Frank Zappa gave to Warren Cuccurullo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIcWxFR4uh0