Mike Sulzer

You could just disconnect the tone pot, as suggested., since it loads the pickups too, but you could use a so-called "no load" pot which is switched off in the 10 position. How is changing the tone cpacitor going to do anything? When you want a bright sound the tone knob is on 10, and so the tone pot is in series with the tone cap blocking its effect. So changing it will not make much difference. Either way, a pedal may be your only choice other than replacing the pickups. If the stock electronics make the guitar sound too bassy, then there's not much you can do. Replacing the pots for higher values or changing the tone capacitor may help (I'd remove the tone pot entirely from the circuit, but that's me), but if it doesn't then you're stuck with the pedal or replacing the electronics. Or dumping the guitar. GBT

Your two speakers probably have different efficiencies; so one would sound louder than the other. But I could not say which one.

Wattage in speakers refers in some way to how much power they can handle. As long as your amp sees the right impedance and the speaker is not damaged, it does not know how much power they can handle.

You should be able to keep reasonable hum canceling by putting two of the coils in parallel and the third in series with those. The two in parallel should have the same magnetic and coil polarity. The third coil should have opposite magnetic polarity and opposite coil polarity. Then you have a humbucker with a wider sampling area than standard. Opening one of the parallel coils gets back a standard humbucker configuration, assuming that the two remaining coils are adjacent. There are other ways, of couse. If the third coil has magnets in phase with the other (parallel) two and the coil is wired out of phase, it still cancels hum, but it also cancels most of the lower string harmonics, giving a strange effect, I think.

Exactly. The G string is the worst problem, both on classical and steel string guitars. You could just move the g string part of the nut a bit less than a millimeter towards the bridge, but I guess if you are going to compensate, you might as well do them all.

A bycycle computer works well, too (not my idea, but a good one). Set it for 1 km = 1000 turns. Ben it sounds like you have good equipment; it just takes some time to develop the skill, like anything else. Why not try a simple single coil pickup first?

Well, no, I think he's asking something a little different, that is, HOW does a chambering guitar (in the Supreme style) affect the sound --why would a guitar sound better with a big hollow chamber inside? It's an interesting question and I can't remember it being addressed recently. With larger chambers the part of the top over these chambers can vibrate more. This vibration takes energy from the strings and also returns it, thus affecting how the strings vibrate. For an extreme effect, put a magnetic pickup on an acoustic guitar. It sounds quite different from a solid body electric even though you are still only picking up the sound of the strings, not the top or body resonances directly.

"whats the point in those metal extruding dots on a humbucker?" They are the "polepieces". In a humbucker they are usually some kind of soft steel of the type that can be magnetized, but do not hold much magnetism permanently. They have two purposes: 1. They become magnetized by the magnet on the bottom of the pickup, and then they magnetize the strings; the one below a string contributes by far the most to magnetizing that string. 2. When the string vibrates, a time-varying magnetic field is produced at the pole pieces; the pole piece amplifies this field because its magnetic domains (little groups of atomic current sources) line up with the applied field. This amplified field then induces a voltage in the coil. Most folks do not really understand much about pickups, so let's not be too rude. To make a drum as you describe you could use a steel material similar to guitar strings. If it is attracted to a magnet it will work. Your project sounds like a lot of fun!

P5 is a volume control; probably want to use audio taper. P6 is a blend; you want to use linear to get equal blending in the middle. P4 shorts the crossover "diodes"; just a guess, but I think an audio taper would give a better range. P3, P1: don't know. P2: I would try linear here. Si for silicon, yes. Just about anything should work. Small switching diodes woud be most convenient. A DC supply could be OK. I do not know if a standard wallwart would have low enough ripple. With this thing running wide open you might get some hum.

"Oh, and just out of interest, can someone tell me what the diode pointing up from ground is for? the one on it's own next to the 3 in a row? I can't see why they need that!?" You want to clip both positive and negative so you need diodes in both directions. Three in series one way and just one in the other means that you have asymmetrical clipping.

Well, there are capacitors more "stable and accurate" than ceramic disk, but I do not think this matters in a guitar. Never noticed any noise either, has anyone else?

"in the book of electronics for dummies is there a simple explanation for why that happens?" I like to think of electrolytic caps as 99% capacitor, 1% battery. Just to make it clear that there is some chemistry going on that I do not really want to think about.

"Doesn't IOW stand for in other words?" Yes, but what fun is that? Lovekraft is right. In guitar amp circuits, removing a cathode bypass cap lowers the gain and thus reduces the tendency to oscillate. I am not saying you could not design a circuit that would work the other way, but it would be exceptional.

Sure, and I like your jumpers better than the method in the quotes. You can connect it up, turn it on, and see what happens. Maybe IOW means "it oughta work", but if you keep sticking caps across circuits with them hot, it will soon mean "Injured and Outa Work".

"A common misunderstanding is that more windings change the spectral response of a pickup. Not so." It certainly does. Increasing the number of windings increases the inductance of the pickup (and slightly increases its capacitance). This lowers the resonant frequency of the pickup (the resonance is caused by this incuctance in conjuntion with the cable capacitance and the capacitance of the elecrostatic coupling between the windings). Lowering the resonant fequency reduces the number of highs if the original resonace was within the frequency range of the guitar, and it usually is.

If you find a way to use two magnets and increase the field strength, you might alter the sound by "string pull". The magnets pulling on a string alter the vibration; in an extreme case you can pull the horizontal and vertical modes apart by more than 1 Hz.

The complete old-fashioned humbucker comes in a metal box that is really all the shielding that it needs. Hum does go up a bit when you take the cover off, but since it still sits on a grounded metal base plate, I doubt that cavity shielding will make much diference; never tried it though.

I think that it is important to remember that the electric guitar is the signal source in a long chain of processing, and so what is most important is how the instrument allows you to control the results of the processing. If you want to hear what matters to the sound of the guitar itself, play some through a really linear equalizer and into really good headphones (Grado, for example). If you have not done this, this you might be amazed at how small differences in guitars are really audible. But so what? These things do necessarily come through the processing chain which is very non-linear and ends with speakers that hide a lot of detail and introduce their own sound. I think one reason why pickups are so high on everyone's list of what matters is because the effects of the magnets on the strings (small to moderate string pull) really come through the processing. I do not know why.

For online sales, I kind of like ALL magnetics and Gaussboys. The first has a pretty large minimum order, and yes, that is the real name of the second.

Didn't someone do this with a P bass pickup pair? Mattia, don't you need to wind those personalized pickups for your almost finished tele and strat you have been working on for, well, almost a year now? (Just a polite reminder, don't mind me.)

Didn't know D did that. OK, right, I will say no more, get studying! Mike

You could try using a non-magnetic shim to move the magnet away from the iron a bit. Easy enough to check on FEMM to see hwat the effect would be.

A 3 mm cube might be too big; a moderate amount of "string pull" does indeed give an agressive sound, but too much splits the horizontol and vertical vibration modes enough to hear the beat frequency.

The Guitarnuts protection circuit is mentioned in a discussion down the page a bit. Shielding a guitar with single coils helps, usually a lot, but it cannot get rid hum from magnetic fields; that requires a bucker. Also buckers, even without the cover, have a metal base plate that is not such a bad shield. So a guitar with humbuckers is way better of an unshielded strat

If you have grounded shielding touching the bridge, it is grounded, and the strings are grounded through the bridge if it is metal.