elmo7sharp9

I built a Varitone into a floor box. It resonates differently with each guitar I plug into it. When recording, the Varitone is great for thinning-out space echo guitars, so that they don't crowd a mix. You can also wire it "backwards" to give (admittedly less useful) stepped rolloff of highs. I stuck a switch in to do this, just because I could.

Would result in non-harmonic string motion (Mother Nature's Ring Modulator).

I'd pay more for a 5-way switch with enclosed contacts to keep out the dirt than I'd pay for something with perceived historical accuracy. After fitting, who is going to see it? Not me, unless it fails...

The buzz disappears when you touch exposed metalwork because you're grounding yourself, the source of the hum. Even if you did expose some of the string's core material by cutting away the coating at the bridge saddles, your fingers would still be electrically insulated from the strings, so you'd be no better off. You could: 1) Run a wire from any ground point on the guitar to any exposed area of flesh, to ground yourself. 2) Use regular strings. 3) Use active pickups - these usually don't require the strings to grounded. You have to balance the (alleged) longevity of Elixir strings against the costs of buying and using them.

These Germanium transistors have probably multiplied in cash value since you bought them. A couple of years ago, I thought I was smart, buying 10 each of AC127 and AC128 from a well-known British bargain-bin mail order business. I thought I'd get, at least, a Fuzz Face and a couple of Rangemasters out of the 20 transistors... But, out of the 20 transistors, only one actually had any electrical properties, the rest were so far out-of-spec as to be useless. I'd have been better off paying premium price for a gain-matched pair. I strongly suspect that these were reject-bin components that my supplier had stored since the late 1960s, in the belief that a market would arise for them sometime.

Threading the "hot" wire through a small ferrite bead helps, too.

I'm not attacking or defending anything. Must you persist with this adversarial approach? Have you learned nothing from being temporarily barred from PG? It's not the only coil of mine that works, just one that had a web page already made, in response to an enquiry on another thread. Heavily distorted sound clip? Clean your ears! I've produced some very dirty sustain in the past, I know the difference... That's a glass bottleneck on clearly sustaining strings, direct-injected into my soundcard. There's no pleasing some folk! I'm beginning to doubt I'd want your attention. I can see that you'll not be satisfied till I've published a mud-cored driver that recharges the battery from the string excursions, while sustaining six strings worth of flattened-fifth intervals.

There's no need for anyone to defend their sustainer or the philosophy behind it. We are all in the same boat... We're attempting to make something that demands knowledge and experience from multiple esoteric fields, simultaneously. It's impossible to develop a sustainer without becoming strongly attached to your own ideas (That's what gives us the impetus to do something new). But it's very easy to get stuck on a peninsula of your own expertise, from which you can see everything quite clearly, but only in your own way. Unfortunately, that's precisely the mechanism that caused the closure of the Monster Thread. If you read my post more carefully, you would realize that I was referring not to your own personal driver (which I'm sure is excellent), but to the advice you were giving to the OP. You were suggesting he selected core materials based on arbitrary factors not directly related to sustainer functionality. Yes, I really mean what I said... use whatever you've got to hand, it's not crucial. Many different coils will work... I've currently got a 1mm high, 90-turn coil with a 5mm wide mild-steel core just sitting on the neck-most coil of a plastic-encased humbucker - very loosely coupled to the magnetic circuit, and it's sustaining as well as any other. For details of the last one I made (not the current one on my bench), take a look and listen to the material at My Website. That's a 200-turn coil of 0.19mm wire, driven by the circuit at the bottom of the page. I take special care to not recommend any specific drive circuit, core material, gauge of wire or number of turns, because I don't believe the current orthodoxy on this is helpful.. And when I see newcomers being recommended an unnecessarily troublesome path to follow, I, also, have to set the record straight. Why use the LM386 when there are solutions that deliver the goods more consistently, across a broader range of drivers, with a smaller component count? Typographical style objections? Now you're just being petty!

I am a regular and long-standing e-bow user and like BOTH e-bow and sustainer modes of playing. I like conventional loudspeaker feedback, too. I prefer the strong drive and wild nature of my current sustainer to commercial sustainers, it sounds and reacts more like an amp stack at high volume. So long as I can get sustain on every note, I'm not concerned about the drive level. I quite like the varying response in different areas of the neck (Something that the commercial manufacturers wouldn't issue, for reasons of mass appeal). I run it at full bore, just below the threshold of squealing, using damping techniques - in both hands - to get the effects I want. The 'arbitrary materials' are not so arbitrary - they're what I had to hand at the time! Within sensible limits, the core material is not so crucial to me. The only coils I've made that were totally useless had too little iron to produce sufficient flux (I was pursuing miniaturisation). For me, external power is a bonus. It's cheaper than batteries and frees me from the constraints of coil efficiency. I already have a 13-pin synth lead and a regular guitar cable, I can bear a power lead as well. Bring on the Christmas Tree Lights! Let those who must have a self-contained system (and possess the equipment and the will to refine the driver coil) pursue that path. I'm certainly interested in reading about the results produced by this approach. I've had success with a tall, thin driver, using the same circuitry that drives the 'orthodox' 3mm high squat driver. And I know I'm not alone in this. So long as the coil is mechanically stable and reasonably matched to the drive circuit, with sufficient loop gain applied to overcome inertia - sustain will occur. The dimensions of commercial sustainer drivers strongly suggest that PSW's design is not the only choice, and if we ALL go down his route, we'll never find the alternatives. The loyalty that the LM386 chip continues to attract is a mystery to me. In designing a headphone distribution amplifier for a friend's studio, I found the LM386 to be, by far, the worst choice in terms of clean power. It's not even a particularly economic choice, requires a Zobel Network, has limited clean headroom... There are plenty of chips, some with integrated preamps yet, at comparable prices. And, let us not forget, commercial sustainer designs generally use a discrete push-pull power amp. For clarification only: The 'preset phase shift' I referred to earlier is a feature of the Floyd Rose sustainer (Built around op-amps U1A and U1D on that well-thumbed diagram) and is an 'on test' optimisation of the the phase response, via a preset pot.

Hello Col. I followed your progress with interest during 2006. Long time, no post... What I meant by that is: Soft Iron is best if, like me, you have no budget and have to make do with what you find at the side of the road. If you can afford them, buy polepieces - because they're a readily available standard part, it's one less variable to deal with, in a project that's got no shortage of variables. That's the route to follow, if you have the time to spare and you're in pursuit of a guitar-mounted, single-PP3 powered device... Tweak the coil efficiency to get peak consumption down, gate the power amp on no-signal too. Apply AGC to even-out the response (and save power when it's not required). Apply a preset phase-shift to optimise the feedback. But not on your first attempt! Alternatively, apply a little more clean power and get something that works first-time with a wide range of coils (Which is the result most first-timers are after).

What you're aiming for is an electromagnet (the drive current through the coil), with some additional permanent magnetism to magnetise the string in the area of drive. For the rapid changes of magnetic flux required by the driver, a soft-iron core is best. Magnetised Alnico polepiece slugs are ideal. Attaching magnets to a soft-iron blade is cheaper. You'll not get very far using pickup wire to build a driver matched to the LM386 chip, which is expecting to see an 8-ohm load. 0.2mm to 0.3mm enamelled copper wire will give you the required impedance, using somewhere between 100 and 220 turns to get an approximate DC resistance reading of around 8 ohms. So long as your capacitors are healthy and the correct values, I wouldn't worry too much about the material they're made of. This is not an audiophile-grade application. If, like me, you discover the LM386 to be underpowered for this application, there are many alternative power amps you can use. This is one that works for me, based on a TDA7052 chip. I advise you to obtain some wire, wind some coils, build some circuits and come back here with your findings.

There are enormous barriers for the DIY enthusiast. To convert a guitar signal to MIDI requires real-time detection of pitch, note on/note off, velocity and real-time translation of these parameters to a coherent stream of MIDI data. The only hobbyist approach I've seen is the EPE Guitar to MIDI System which is strictly monophonic, doesn't detect pitchbends, uses the guitar's own pickup and firmware in a PIC microntroller. You can see it in action If you add to that the need for: a custom-made hex pickup, 6 separate pitch detectors, a microprocessor to assemble a continuous polyphonic MIDI stream... It's a tall order! For less than £200, you can buy a 1980s midi guitar synth that outperforms anything you could construct by yourself.

You are describing what's known around here as a bilateral driver. Some commercial designs apply a common signal to 2 separate coils, for bass and treble strings, with the same goal as a humbucker, to eliminate radiated noise. The coils are electrically out-of-phase and the permanent magnet for each coil is attached with opposing polarity. The end result is that both sets of strings are driven in the same mode, but the electrical noise radiated towards the source pickup is largely cancelled. This arrangement allows more gain to be used in the sustainer circuit, without unwanted noise or squealing. It's particularly helpful when using a single coil pickup as the Source pickup. If your "humbucking" driver covered all 6 strings and was the same size and shape as a regular humbucking pickup, there's a danger of there being "dead spots" in the sustain - at frequencies whose period is some multiple of the distance between the polepieces (high notes, mostly). DIY experimenters on PG have reported success with drivers based on this arrangement, but using a far smaller distance (millimetres) between the coils, so that the coils are operating to assist each other throughout the guitar's range.

Yes, that's precisely how it works. Feeding an inverted signal to the strings damps the fundamental note and encourages other pitches, already present in the string's harmonic series, to dominate. You're likely to be using more gain to get the same level of sustain in the harmonic mode as you would get in fundamental mode, so you're amplifying any ambient electrical noise and radiating it from your driver coil. This noise diminishes when you touch the strings or bridge because you're grounding yourself, thus eliminating the major cause of near-field electrical noise . There are several factors that cause certain strings and notes to dominate. The ideal sustainer would have a source pickup with a completely flat frequency response, followed by a flat-response amplifier, feeding into a flat-response driver. Real-world guitar pickups have a pronounced midrange peak (Early commercial sustainers insisted on using their replacement flat-response source pickup). Real-world amplifiers are not ideal... Even with a flat frequency design, the phase relationship between input and output varies with frequency The ideal sustainer would operate on a balanced string set, where each string would respond equally well to a drive signal. Real-world string sets have a wide spread of string masses (more mass=more iron=more drive for the same current) and string inertias (looser strings=less inertia). You can see that it's a trade-off between these two factors. You can overcome this, to some extent, by having the blade or polepieces of the driver at different distances from each string. The ideal sustainer would operate on a guitar that didn't have pronounced mechanical resonances. Real-world guitars are full of them - it's a major component of the character of the guitar. These factors all multiply together to give us quirky results, even from the best designs.

In similar drunken situations, I find that closing one eye aids comprehension and, curiously, helps slide-guitar intonation by cutting out unnecessary 3D information. Closing both eyes is best - the trouble disappears completely!

2.5 watts is more than enough! Looks like we've found a winner. Hey, Wez... I'm used to I.T. report writing with a lot of keywords in bold. It's become my personal style, I'm not about to change... I used it, here, to point out that this gadget could be a shortcut to a working sustainer for a lot of folk. It could be the solution to a long-standing barrier to DIY sustainer success.

Congratulations! Hope you've got a use for notes that last forever! I think you are tremendously lucky in getting good first time results. But bear in mind - you've also put in some study and effort to wind an effective driver coil. Can you post a link to the guitarfetish product you're using? I think you may be on to something here. I enjoy building electronic circuits from components and have the experience to do it well, but I'm probably in the minority on Project Guitar. Construction of electronic circuits is a major barrier to most would-be DIY Sustainer users. The results vary considerably, even amongst experimenters following the same design. If you've found a readily-available drop-in circuit, that fits on board the guitar then it's a giant leap forward for electronics-shy folk who aren't afraid of winding a couple of hundred turns of wire (which is the easy part). Out of curiosity... Any idea of how many turns of 30AWG wire you wound on to your bobbin? What string gauges/scale length are you using on the guitar? What model of pickup are you using for the source signal? How far is the centre of the driver from the 1st-string saddle?

This is an educated guess... I've never fitted one but, it takes more poles on the On/Off switch, in order to use their driver as a pickup when the sustainer is switched off, than it does to change hamonic mode. The low-impedance driver needs to be switched to the step-up transformer on the back of the PCB. See if the images at benfordguitars.com make things any clearer.

Brass fretwire is what's used on mass-manufactured beginner's acoustic guitars from the Far East. It will stand up to nylon strings for awhile... As well as wearing out fast, it tarnishes green when left alone (gathering dust under the bed, along with the hula hoop and the yo-yo).

I've wired more guitars than I've had free beers, so I knew my wiring was right... I had thought this was down to cheap pots not zeroing correctly, with residual resistance, insignificant on a 0-500k scale, that's significant on a 0-25K scale Although I didn't actually consider this an operational problem, I took the backplate off, found the controls wired correctly, but the tone pot's nut had loosened, the tone pot had rotated away from its fixed position, stretching the ground wire from the pot casing to the socket, breaking the solder joint. So it's fixed and operating normally, now. But I have lost my right to never turn the bass down. See what Project Guitar does to the unwary? They've got me fixing things I didn't even consider to be broke!

If you find a regular killswitch's releasing to play each note counter-intuitive... Wire two pushbuttons, one Normally Open and one Normally Closed , in series, side-by-side in a covenient location. Push and hold the Normally Open button, with the side of your thumb, to silence your guitar, then gate notes on using any convenient finger on the Normally Closed button. Release both buttons to play normally. Using thumb-and-middle-finger on the buttons, you can do this without letting go of a plectrum!

That's clearer. That preamp is designed to go into a high-impedance amplifier input, so you can treat the preamp's output just like you would a regular pickup. Go ahead and use an identical pot to the pots you're using for the humbuckers (You're effectively building a passive mixer). Use the (hidden) existing preamp's volume slider to trim the volume from the piezo to match the maximum volume from your humbuckers.

No crack involved, Ansil. I have, right behind me, an EMG-EQUIPPED bass with regular-value pots. The last owner was too lazy to switch the pots and the current owner (me) never uses the volume controls. The volumes don't go down to zero and the tone control didn't roll off as much as it should (till I dropped in a 25k).

Can't say for certain without looking at the specific circuit. It may work perfectly well. One possibility is that the volume control will work to some extent but not actually give you zero volume when turned all the way down. This happens when you use regular pots instead of 25k on an EMG active pickup. Wire it up outside the guitar to see the effect, without laborious physical installation.

Looks like yours is an oddity. Take a look at: Gibson ES 345 description Especially the part that says: "... Three-position toggle switch. Stereo wiring and "Y" cable. Vari-Tone built-in tone selector. Six pre-set tonalities." I've never owned a 345, but I liked the Varitone so much, I made one and installed it in a floor box. It resonates differently with each guitar I play through it.