pan_kara

I have a guitar where the middle pickup is added into the circuit via a blend pot - nothing in the middle position, and in/out of phase depending on which way you turn. But that's in parallel. For the humbuckers the question is of course in the other direction (turning them down, not the middle pup - as you said). I think that coil tapping the humbucker will be enough though. I can always play with the pickup height. But yea - now to find the time for this ...

that's gonna be interesting to hear, true. Can't wait for the whole build actually concerning Bohemian - I plan to do another video focusing just on that, and how different elements play a role. Clearly I'm omitting some (the tri-sonic pickups, the coin-as-a pick etc) but even with that I think I can get very very close. What I want to do now (before I shoot that video) is to add a switch to my main every day guitar (a superstrat with a HSH pickup configuration), that puts the middle pickup in the circuit in series. I wonder how close can you get by just modding a HSH guitar. The middle pickup will be weaker than the humbuckers so the phase cancellations will be slighly less pronounced (but I can always coil-tap the HB, that's sonething I already added to that guitar), the positions of the pickups are different so the harmonic pattern will be a tiny bit different ... But I still think it will be very close.

It is an artifact caused by a photo filter. Looks like an unsharp mask with a big radius. Sometimes called "clarity" and other things in some apps. It's been showing up in some of Luis's posts. By accident maybe? In that post it's on photos #1 and #3 (compare the grass for example). Then it's gone and makes a comeback in the maple burl pic. (which is crazy awesome)

Well this took a while. The full demo of this guitar is now up:

the double sided tape that I had at the time was really crappy and it had a slight flex.... So hot melt glue - I never ever used the stuff. How do you get the piece off after glueing it?

I'm looking at the planing jig .. I've gone through several iterations of a simiral idea, with various degrees of success. Holding the subject down has always been one of the delicate points for me. So really, tape is enough? That would be a much simpler solution that the various contraptions that I usually devise for the purpose edit: oops just saw the post about the accident, hope it heals ok!

ah ok, in that case I'd go with ebony or one of my 100 to-try fancy fingerboard woods (bocote, snakewood, b&w ebony, purpleheart, ziricote, etc etc) bloodwood? if red fits into your design, bloodwood is an awesome fingerboard wood

well if wenge neck then how about maple (regular, flame, birdseye...) for fretboard? Should give nice contrast and goes against the usual "dark fingerboard - light neck" thing that we're seeing everywhere. I have a rosewood neck build planned down the road and I thing that's what I'm going to do there

wow, good luck with marketing this stuff man, this is really something new! The fingerboards are a bit much for my taste but the body tops are fantastic, and I especially like the acoustic bridges @ other stuff that you can cut out of this.

I guess what people usually call "drop top" is when the body cap (fancy/figured wood usually) is ~several mm thin and flat - as opposed to a "carved top" which is much thicker and thus can be carved. So when doing a forearm contour on a body with a drop top you either have to bend the top over the contour as @Pariahrob is saying, or cut the contour right through is, which can also look pretty cool. BTW since I'm here - I'd also vote for the bevel, I like how it flows within the design.

Clearly this is in line with the expectations. Though for the higher strings I'm having slightly mixed results. In general I've been testing materials that I've seen nuts made out of so didn't consider steel. I do consider it for a fret test, which is probably next in line - currently I have EVO gold in that guitar, so I plan to record a sample with that and then pull the first fret and put a stainless one in, then normal nickel silver, then back to EVO gold. I expect the differences to be much smaller (if measurable at all - we'll see). Bone is in the queue. As is a piece of rosewood that I wanted to have a slighlt more extreme case. And a plastic nut. The bridge side is another thing that I'm thinking of, though replacing bridges on the guitar is not something that's on my shortlist at the moment (especially after the previous failure). Swapping out saddles in a hardtail is something that I could imagine. Also I do plan to do a floyd rose floating vs blocked test. (I'd do a replacement "tone block" test also if I had one laying around). I agree that "nut tone" doesn't immediately impact most of what you hear from the guitar as any impact vanishes the moment you fret a note. And in fact I forsee nearly all of my other measurements to be done fretted - to have the nut out of the equation. Here's why I think this study is useful I'm still figuring out the method, so this is a good test case, allowing me to keep most things constant I can see how big the effect from the nut is, I can compare this later to other things I'll be measuring - does changing the nut make more difference than steel vs nickel frets? Than mahogany vs alder body? Than old vs new strings? This will to some extent translate into the differences caused by different bridge materials The idea about using fretted notes as a control sample vs string aging is a very good one, sadly I didn't consider string aging when I started the current recording batch so I can only test from now into the future. I have one other option though: some of these have been re-recorded since in the first batch I was mostly doing short 6-10 second notes, and for the low E to really see the decay you need closer to a minute. But in fact with the way I'm looking at this now (average RMS after 1-2 seconds or so) the old recordings would be perfectly fine to compare. So I need to make some plots for those, maybe I'll be able to see if there is any effect going. I hope not, otherwise I'd have either to keep chaging the strings, or do everything as quick as possible which would mean having to set aside quite some time for sitting down and plucking a string once every 30-60 seconds for ... I don't even want to cound how many times ..

lol now I'll need to check them out. perheaps they would be interested in my results

hmm nope, I don't have any Corian. Before we get into mass ordering or any other ordering I guess I have to still prove that I'm seeing a difference between the materials (BTW speaking of mass, I could also see if adding mass to the headstock makes a measurable difference). I'm starting to get there. I still need to work out some loose ends, the slotted vs unslotted test needs to be done properly (I only did a quick one). Plus I'm starting to wonder if string aging can be impacting my results (I still have the same set of strings on since I started the nut tests, it's been like a month or two - but I practically don't touch the strings ...) But while I cross-check those things - I got my analysis to a point where I can do comparisons between several recordings, and I have the full set of measurements for four nuts now. So here's the fundamental frequency for about 25 notes recorded for brass, tusq, graphite and an old roller nut that I found. Each nut is represented by a different color. it's not super pretty, but the colors do appear to form different structures. It's easier to see what's happening if I make a new plot by averaging all the notes from a given nut: By the way - I'm normalizing all the plots to have the peak at the same height. This is in line with my concept of measuring the decay properties (that are a parameter of the system) rather than the initial conditions (which depend on how the string was hit). So, anyway, There appears to be some distinction between the different colors, though I have to visualize also the uncertainty/precision of the averaged graph so that we can see if the differences are within statistical error. But as we go to higher harmonics, the picture quicky clears itself out quite a bit: Here the separation is clearly visible. So how to summarize these results without looking at 50 plots showing the decay of different sting vibration modes (which is what I anyway did)? We can show the plot vs frequency - we know the frequency of each overtone. So what de we plot? I went away from fitting straight lines to these plots for the moment, end I'm doing a conceptually simpler thing: since these plots are all normalized, all the overtones begin decaying from 0 dB. So one could ask a question - how much will they have decayed after - for example - 2 seconds. Well we can plot this vs frequency: So this is already starting to tell us something - looks like the brass nut is sustaining best, closely followed by the tusq. The roller nut is worse, and the graphite nut is even worse. This is most apparent in the 1-1.5kHz region. For the lower overtones the differences are more subtle. In any case all of these follow a similar shape, that determined by the rest of the elements of the test system (body, neck, bridge etc).

wow interesting can't wait to see that idea materialize!

wait, so crackle finish is going on that poplar top? (which is awesome btw) I guess you were referring to that other one? espen.de - I don't think I bought from them yet, or maybe once .. but once I start stocking up for the next round of builds I'll probably go with them, they appear to have all the things that I'll be needing, good to hear you can recommend them

fingers crossed any specific reason for not having done the neck pocket before the top carve? That's how I'd think would be natural, though I never noticed what people are doing and have yet to attempt doing a carved top myself..

thanks guys, I'll definitely give it a try at some point. I see now Tim, you even said in the post that the blue flame top is with Tru oil. Nice!

Actually now that "nut slotting" is in writing I gave it some more thought and indeed a dedicated test would make sense (the list is growing endlessly...). The only thing is the actual break angle - I might need to redo the brass low E measurements, when I was doing them initially I heard some faint buzzing that I couldn't locate no matter how hard I tried - I looked at the tuners, other parts of the string, loose felt pieces, loose nut, loose frets?? - (the guitar has no truss rod so that's out of the question). Finally I realised that the string is rattling in the slot in the nut. Looks like I made it to flat (parallel to the fingerboard surface) to the string wasn't resting hard enough against the nut edge, causing buzzing. I ended up clamping it down and got rid of all the buzzes but I'm not 100% convinced that was "legal". I already see that there is a similar problem with the slots that I cut in the bone nut, so I have to postpone the recording of the bone samples until I have my nut slots back (in a few days). But I could compare a nut that has an angled surface with the string running over the flat edge, against having a slot cut for the string. Actually if I rest the string between the slots in the graphite nut that is installed at the moment, that might work.. hmm... Anyway, in general I agree with your comment, Carl, my first thing to check was the validity of the method. Whether I can take out of the equation the things that I want to take out - the electronics, the initial conditions (string pluck) etc. Not having the influence of those things removed is for me the biggest flaw of all the other approaches to this problem that I came across. Strangely, I haven't found anybody doing this my way, which continues to puzzle me since for me this is the most obviously correct approach (unless it's in fact incorrect, for some reasons that I'm still missing). That was step zero, from what I learned up to now it is a success. Step one is checking the precision of the method - how repeatable are the results if I hit the string many times, possibly in different ways. What kind of effect I can consider an actual phenomenon and what falls below my precision or statistical uncertainty. The plost that I just posted illustrate that to some extent - the differences from changing the nut material are clearly bigger than the variations between the individual notes (measurements). So step two is to learn how big is the influence of various things. Right now I'm looking at nut material, for most other tests I want to use a fretted note as baseline (when comparing scale lenghts, string gauges, bridges, finally woods, bolt-ons etc). Then the nut goes out of the equation. I'll compare different fret materials to see if I can measure any difference caused by that. And so on. I use TUSQ for pretty much everything. Except when putting in a locking nut. Zero frets not yet but in general I like the idea and might switch to that. Ok, another idea since you mentioned zero fret - I can add that to the comparison. If I fret the strings at the first fret. The scale will be a few mm off, but I hope that won't affect the result much. (will know later when I do the big scale length set of measurements....) For now I there's not a lot to summarize, you can see all that I have in the plots - brass generally has a bit more sustain than Tusq, at least in the low mids. Should be able to look past 1-2kHz soon, that's going to be interesting. And then all the other materials - plastic, bone, fretted note - when I plot all of these together we'll see how they compare.

I promised some results, so here goes. I've been working on the actual signal analysis quite a bit and most stuff is not processed yet - it actually takes a while to run all the calculations for for development I was only working with the first 5 harmonic overtones on some first recordings. But at least I have enough stuff for first comparisons. So here is the low E string for a Tusq nut (RED color in all the following plots) and a brass nut (BLUE in all the plots). First, the fundamental. Here is all the notes for both bridges, superimposed. Plotting the amplitude in dB vs time in seconds, but I'm normalizing all the lines such that they peak at 100 dB (I'm interested in the shape only anyway) Pretty consistent decay between the two nuts, some interference patterns with very low frequency, in general looking good. So now for a clearer look, I'll average all the graphs for both notes. So only two lines remain: I also zoomed in a little and smoothed the graphs. So now we start seeing some differences. In fact, let's zoom in more - looking at the note decay over one minute is interesting if I want to measure the sustain for example, but for just comparing the harmonic content difference between the two setups, I'd look at the first 5 or 10 seconds of the signal, which is how long notes get to sound in music normally. So, zoom in more and remove the smoothing: a yet different picture. So overall the fundamental doesn't differ much between the two nuts, the attack is similar (the first peak is in the same place), just that for the TUSQ after the initial attack the vibration actually increases over the first 1-2 seconds before going into the decay. So probably some energy first goes into some mode that we're not picking up and then comes back. The structure of this attack is something that I might still look into, maybe my normalization is messing with it a little. Clearly the string takes a moment to start properly vibrating after being struck with the pick. For the higher harmonics this is less messy. Here is the first octave overtone (I'm only showing the zoomed-in plots): Nice match, TUSQ clearly decays a little bit faster, we quickly have a 2-3 dB dip at 167 Hz. Next overtone: here the difference is bigger, 250 Hz dies out even quicker with a TUSQ nut. AAt 330 Hz we pretty much have a match. There's some oscillations visible for the BRASS nut, but no big deal. Finally, at 415 Hz again the TUSQ nut decays faster, but not dramatically. That's all I have for now. I should be able to look at the higher harmonics soon, and also at the other strings. Of course higher up is where interesting stuff should be happening - we get into how "bright" the tone is and how the higher frequency content is shaped. I'm also wondering to what extent the results will be compatible across the three strings - if I see an effect at 2 kHz for example, will that be visible for all three, indicating that this is really a propery of the nut that I'm probing. We'll see. BTW @Prostheta I keep wondering what was that paragraph that you kept typing in and deleting I would be very much interested in hearing your and others' thoughts on this. I hope it will get more interesting soon!

All right, I think I'm ready to show a first actual result. Or at least a result teaser. I'm currently recording note samples with my selection of different nuts - so basically "how doest the guitar nut material impact tone". Of course what I'm discovering first is how does the quality of the nut slotting job impact tone, but with that (hopefully) under control now, I'm starting to be able to actually observe stranger things. Just two words about the setup: the fingerboard is flat so I'm just resting the nut somewhere behind the 1st fret and letting string tension keep it in place. In fact now to make sure it's enough, I additionally clamp it down with a capo (of course taking care to note have the capo touch the strings). I make sure the vibrating lenght of the string is constant across all measurements (615mm IIRC) and all the strings are tuned to E. I'm measuring across 3 octaves with a .046, .026 and 0.010 gauge. Then there's a ton of felt and stuff to mute irrelevant parts of the string etc. The guitar is laying flat on some foam, connected to the sound card and to ground with a separate wire. Then I record a series of ~25 note plucks for each data point. At some point I'll put out a video showing all of this, here's just a frame grab to illustrate the setup: continued in next post

wow this is truly stunning and all the finish experiments paid off - the matter finish on the walnut top is fantastic. I'm going to need to research this OSMO stuff...

Welcome! Not so long ago I was doing body shaping with a jigsaw and a robosander Good luck with the RG!

its always inspiring to see people put in the extra work in places where I'd never think of. Like that wiring trick. Love that. Also - tru-oil over dyed top.. For some reason I always assumed that tru oil would work as a natural (unstained) finish, and for dyed tops I'm forced to spray some clear. What kind of stain did you use here? I'd think tru-oil is gonna add some amber tint to the finish, but for red it's not a problem, I wonder how that would work on blue or green. Looks like I need to do some tests on scrap.

ah a wedge, never though of that. Would work for the outer bits indeed. Aren't the chamfers simply 45 degrees? So a normal chamfer cutter would work (though might not be long enough). The back side is going to be tricky. Looking forward to seeing how you tackle that!

If I were to add some extra switching it would probably a phase reversal switch for the middle pickup. I actually wired one strat with a blend pot (instead of the second tone knob) that blends the middle pup in- or out-of phase (depending on which way you turn it), and the 5-way just controls the different combinations of neck/bridge + coil-tap. While that is probably on the overkill side a little, a possibility to phase-reverse the middle pickup could give you some funny tones (though when wired in parallel they can be a bit quiet and possibly of little use unless you really crank the gain).