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.

scraping off the coating between the pickup and bridge

Would result in non-harmonic string motion

(Mother Nature's Ring Modulator).

Considering the broad range of applications for this switch and the accurate vintage specs do you think this is something I should pursue?

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...

I tested the string with my multimeter. Set to the 20k range, with a probe on each end of the string (playing part of the string where the coating is), I read infinite resistance.

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.

been finishing old projects recently which have been doing my head in for a while, found a treble booster board that i had bought about 6 years ago and never got round to building.

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.

You can usually get rid of RFI by adding a 47pF-100pF cap to ground on the input of the offending circuit.

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

The irony is painful to my sides...

You're defending your point about many different coils working and attacking me for suggesting that beginners should follow known existing designs.

I'm not attacking or defending anything.

Must you persist with this adversarial approach?

Have you learned nothing from being temporarily barred from PG?

Then to back up your point, you describe and provide a link to your sustainer which turns out to be an almost exact copy of one of Pete's old driver designs.

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.

In addition, your sound clip is heavily distorted

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!

- show me a driver design with significantly different specs from the ones in the old thread, and provide clips demonstrating it's ability to provide strong CLEAN sustain - then you will have my attention

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 you to defend your sustainer or the philosophy behind it.

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.

The 'arbitrary materials' are not so arbitrary - they're what I had to hand at the time!

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.

You might also note that I am suggesting that people without the technical knowledge and equipment should base their driver as closely as possible on a 'known to work' existing design. I gave Pete's as an example, but if you were to post evidence of the success of your own design, and post the specifications, then my recommendation is equally applicable to your driver.

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..

As far as the LM386, everyone knows its not great - I listed a bunch of limitations in the thread. No-one is 'loyal' to it. However, there are very few proven existing designs out there with circuit diagrams and evidence of successful functionality that are publicly available. Some of the few that are available use the LM386, so when I see inaccurate vague advice about driver materials, and then in the same post the LM386 is being described as 'underpowered', it make sense to set the record straight.

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?

Btw, isn't it annoying when people spatter their posts with bold type. IT'S EVEN WORSE THAN SHOUTING

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...

To suggest that iron is best then say alnico is ideal is odd considering there is no iron at all in alnico. As its name suggests, alnico is primarily aluminium, nickel and cobalt.

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.

If you find the LM386 to be 'under powered' then your driver and or other parts of you circuit are sub-optimal and you should look there for some more performance.

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!

There are certainly problem with the LM386 - it's distortion characteristics are poor, so the circuit need some careful design to eliminate nasty grunge and fizz, but lacking power is not an issue - it's possible to get some of the strings rattling off the frets with an LM386, and even the 'difficult' B and E strings can be driven well with an LM386.

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).

First off I was wondering if when you make the driver, could you possibly use the drivers magnet AS the core, istead of having seperate pole pieces, etc. And if so, would it effect the tone, or overall output of the driver,

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.

as I am having problems with not getting any output whatsoever when I try to wind it.(i'm using wire from an extra sc pickup from a cheap strat) Im not sure whether it's the wire itself or if I'm not winding it enough times, and also what to do if the wire breaks( wire occasionally breaks when winding and was wondering if you could simply twist the end to another thread and keep winding)

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.

Next I was wondering what kind of capacitors are in the circuit( I used the ruby circuit as my pickups are fairly high in output) as of now on the pcb I made it has ceramic capacitors I believe(the round orange ones) rated at 47n and 100n.

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.

Lastly, i would appreciate some advice on the subject as I'm too lazy to read through 200+ pages in the sustainer thread.

I advise you to obtain some wire, wind some coils, build some circuits and come back here with your findings.

Does anyone know any good resources for constructing your own MIDI pickup?

I'm thinking a hex driver would be best so you get all 6 notes separate.

Any thoughts or success stories?

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.

im just wondering if you could do certain balancing tricks with a dual coil design and increase the sustainers abilities. or if it will just cancel out the goal of the sustainer.

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.

the harmonic mode is i guess working it sustains just a higher note than the actual string tell me if this is how its supposed to work please?

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.

the mixed mode though seems wrong i can hear the odd EMI sounds if im not actually touching the strings or bridge?

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 .

Anyways i have played notes that sustain and of course open strings however it seems that it works a little too well on the G string (standard tuned guitar) meaning that if im trying to sustain the b or e and im not muting the G the sound of the G will overpower the others, I'm guessing its somehow connected to a dominant frequency within the circuit or related to the pickup?

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.

I do understand the use of bold to highlight key points, and i know i am being picky here... but the use of bold can also confuse if not used carefully. When reading your post i found the extra emphasis was throwing off the flow of the sentence for me as a drunken friday night reader

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.

the bold in the posts confuses me :?

all of which i managed to do without highlighting pointless words in bold... seriously - whats that about? are punctuation and explanation marks not enough??? (not that i claim to use those things well)

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.

So thank you everyone for reading and please post and tell me what you think. oh and Hello! lol

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?

Anyone here ever put a Fernandes Sustainer pickup system in their guitar? Someone at a music store gave me a used one yesterday. I have one of my guitars all ready to install the circuitboard, but I don't know which switch is for on/off and which one is the harmonic switch. I downloaded the installation manual and it doesn't say which one is which. One of the switches is a DPDT toggle switch and the other one is a 3PDT toggle switch.

Can anyone tell me which switch is which?

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.

I read in a book that brass fretwire should be avoided at all costs.

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 wonder if the volume control is wired as a variable resistor instead of a volume control. A volume control should go to zero to full volume if it is wired correctly, no matter what the value of the pot is. Does one of the lugs go to ground? If it has a lug soldered to the pot body, but the body isn't connected to ground, it will just be a variable resistor instead of a volume control.

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!

the preamp already has a volume control, but it's going to be tucked away in the control cavity. I want a pot after the preamp that is accessible. and obviously i want the output of the piezo to be comparable to the mag pups.

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.

with all due respect what monkey crack are you smoking. using any pot in an emg will give you actual zero volume i do this all the time if you get a pot doing that it is because the pot is sheit my friend.

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).

A quick and hopefully easy question:

i know that for a piezo preamp the correct volume pot would be a 25k.

but what would the upshot be if i used a 250k instead?

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.

Im trying to wire up a 345 and it seems the switc is a 2 way not a 3 way it is original all diagrams show this as a pickup selecter any ideas whats up with this?

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.