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.

Cheers, I'll look into the pots, probably change them to a 500k on neck and 1meg on bridge - a pedal isn't what I'm looking for as its only this guitar that has problems.

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.

Ok thanks, One more question for ya if you don't mind, If I had a 200 watt speaker on the left of my 2x12, and a lower (30) on the right.. would the left side of the cabinet be louder? Or does that even make sense? hehe.. Thanks

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.

Anyone have any idea if more wattage in speakers will damage my PA? since my PA only wants 233w per channel, and im planning on getting speakers that will do above that?

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.

To each their own, of course, but wiring in series is the only way to get any intrinsic "benefit" (using the word loosely, because it might end up sounding crap) of having 3 single coils so close together.

Having an odd number of coils will cancel out the hum cancelling to a degree, too.

Greg

would a compensated nut solve the g string problem

every tuner i have tried including a peterson strobe

sounded horrible to my ears and its always the g string

if i tune to open chords then power chords futher up the

neck sound bad and vise versa. am i just one of those

people that suffer from from a perfect pitch ear?

id really love to solve this dillema cause it drives me nuts

and yes my intonation is spot on to the peterson

thats why i always wanted to try buzzes system

i figured if Joe Satch uses it then it must work well

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.

Another thing I found for a counter is to solder the reed switch in place of the equals button on a cheap calculator, press 1 + 1 then start spinning.

Found that here by the way: http://galileo.spaceports.com/~fishbake/index.html

-Dream

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?

There are TONS of threads already about this exact subject. I know cause I've said alot in them. Search function rocks

Chris

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.

cool, thanks any info on the other answers? I suspect that I'll be using audio taper pots, but if it's wrong then it'll be far to sensitive! And I think I can use a regular power jack thingy right?

"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?

A question for all you electronics gurus:

The other day I was looking at the instructions for shielding a strat on the Guitar Nuts website. In the Flash slideshow showing the pictorial of the process, they show a "film-type tone capactior" which they claim are "far more stable, accurate, and quiet than the ceramic discs..."

The second slide shows a better picture of the capacitor in question, referring to it as the "Chiclet" type. Then providing an axiom of "Looks like it should go in the mouth=good, looks like a squished booger=bad"

So my question is two fold: i.) what are the fundamental differences between the two types of capacitors, and ii.) is it worth the extra few cents per capacitor for a film v. ceramic?

"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".

i've got a fairly new fender deluxe in the shop for repair..basic case of motorboating in the overdrive channel. (if you play with the drive control knob you can make it rev up and then take off real fast)

anyway, i remembered a thread i started some time ago and looked it up to find this quote:

"In case you didn't think of this, one way to test for open filter caps is to hold a new capacitor of equal (or even a bit greater) value on underside of the pc board on the pins of the suspect capacitor (connected in parallel with it IOW) and see if it makes the oscillations stop."

any reason i can't take two small jumpers with alligator clips and connect a new cap to the old one..pos to pos, neg to neg and see if it stops? makes perfect sense to me but then i've been known to blow stuff up while making perfect sense before.

by the way..in the quote above he uses the initials IOW..whazatmean?

"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.

I know that using more windings increases output but changes the tonal qualities, and that using different types of magnets affects the tone too, but what about using 2 magnets of the same type? would this just increace the output of the pickup, or would it have some sort of an effect on it's tone too?

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.

Hi.

Is pickup cavity shielding required for humbuckers?

If not in general, what about for coil cut function ?

Would you line the bottoms of the pickup rings like the underside of (say) a tele pickguard?

TIA

RobSm

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.

There are bunches of 'magnet shops' that sell disk and square (rare earth and ceramic, mostly) magents. Several in Germany, a few in the UK, quite a few in the US. Cheap, too. I'm gonna get some to hold control cavities on. Don't like screws much, see.

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.)

Re: pickup choice, could you not use two pickups offset from each other? at least then you wouldn't have to comprimise string spacing.

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

That's a good idea Mike sounds like something a pickup maker begining with D is doing!

Hopefull I'll be able to do some winding and making soon but I've got a whole load of exams so I really should be revising and not messin' arround with magnets!

Robert

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.

That could work but you'd need some sort of bar of Iron os steel lalong the pole pieces as well....but I don't think they will be to powerful. At least not at the small size I've suggested. From all the simulations I've done they appear to be just right. guess we'll find out when I get my magnets and try it out!

Robert

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

Yeah,that is what I figured.Thanks for letting me know.The shielding certainly does make a difference,compared to my other guitar without it.I bet with single coils it really helps.I have humbuckers in all of mine.Anyone tried the method in Guitarnuts.com for shock protection? It's basically a fuse,which absorbs the shock,from what I have read there.Looks like it could be a good idea,to keep from getting zapped.I may try it.....it's a cheap mod,so why not?

My question is:

since I had no string ground wire actually touching the bridge,but only touching the shielding which makes connection to it,is this a string ground circuit?

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