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Prostheta

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Everything posted by Prostheta

  1. Great call! I'm sure people will find this useful.
  2. Thank you for the kind words! As with most things with me it seems, my large amount of time spent percolating over ideas often ends up with circumstances evolving beyond the original purpose of the idea. I still have this bench, however I personally didn't find sufficient use for it in way it was designed. Functionally it is excellent and perhaps I should just write an article honestly about how it ended up....another surface covered in stuff as storage space when moving things away and off other things....overall I think it is the sort of specific use workbench that requires a larger and less cluttered shop so that it doesn't end up smothered into disuse. A luxury that I think few people have in their own shops?
  3. Good call! Hardly a necro thread when it is still very much referred to
  4. Prostheta

    Guitar Of The Year 2023

    Guitar Of The Month - January 2023 @mattharris75 - The Zenith Guitar Of The Month - June 2023 @Andyjr1515 - Fireswift Guitar Of The Month - September 2023 @mistermikev - Fish On II Guitar Of The Month - December 2023 @ADFinlayson - YASCB
  5. I'm not bothered really. It's far too ubiquitous to claim or trademark. It just means I need to do some actual thinking to find a unique identifier!
  6. Looks like I'll have to be changing the name on the headstocks of my guitars.
  7. I don't hate it. If anything I like the idea of being able to use common existing components without modifying them for this sort of retrofit. There's a sizeable difference between the bobbin screw spacing of my TBH-11 and APH-1N. That's probably why Rob mentions that the bridge pickup preamp has a small "bump" as this implies both preamps have different levels of gain. More or less unity for the neck ("fingerboard" as he calls it) and a slightly hotter bridge. Did he also mention some sort of op-amp used specifically for pickups in that video? "There isn't a custom op-amp made for a pickup until this one", nice grammar butchery. The death of the LM-4250 might mean that EMG had their hand forced to move to a different op-amp, so maybe this is what he meant even though this is not what he said. It might simply be the same LM-4250 topology but remade enough not to need any sort of licensing to TI or whoever. More than likely it's an op-amp custom-made with ultra-low current consumption with frequency performance comparable to that of the LM4250 with the Iset resistor hard-wired internally. The shots of the preamp in production shows something like 3-4 SMD resistors and four SMD chip capacitors, so I'd almost put money on this being the same preamp as used in the 81 or maybe the X series, however that preamp differed. Maybe it was only a different Iset value to improve frequency range and reduce compression in-circuit. Speculation anyway. I think an 81 preamp circuit built around a TL071 or OPA1655 would be fine.
  8. In fact, look at what EMG do with their "Retro Active" pickups. This to me looks like a standard pickup with an external preamp bolted onto the rear as I proposed. https://www.emgpickups.com/guitar/fat-55-set.html
  9. I haven't put a lot of thought into it, since I know that my resources are stretched fairly thinly right now, what with building the CNC. It would be a great way to modernise my #1 Ibanez, however it might make just as much sense to have a preamp in the cavity instead. It's just super cramped, what with being an HSH configuration and a thin body S.
  10. Very cool. I've half been considering whether to make a small batch of balanced preamps to fit onto the rear of existing commercial pickups because of the stray earth noise we seem to get in Finnish electrics. EMGs and Fluence are dead silent, but I get noise even with basic passive humbuckers.
  11. It's a combination of two things, perhaps three. Gibson headstocks with the traditional compression rods remove a huge chunk of wood for the rod adjustment nut, plus use a higher headstock angle of ~17deg which shortens the length of grain from headstock face to behind the nut. That makes them exceptionally weak compared to lower angles of 11-13deg (I forget what angle the SB-1000, etc. had). The best Aria Pro II necks came laminated, which means that each pieces that forms the neck has a slightly different growth ring alignment with respect to its neighbouring pieces, providing a less clean path through any short grain. They'll break, but the resistance to it is far higher than a single-piece neck. Without exact numbers, I recall guitars as being something like 120lbs of tension and basses 160lbs? It's a far amount of difference, but I don't think there's a lot of correlation between basses being more prone than guitars to headstock breakages. At least, not from string tension as a factor. It tends to be more about shock from being dropped. I would hazard that it's more about headstock angle. Basses don't seem to use anything nearly as high as Gibsons, and I would think that is where most of the difference lays rather than simple cross-section.
  12. Sounds like a longer scale as well? There's so many variables that go into a design. Sounds nice and tight though. EQ'ed out that would work really nicely.
  13. This is true. My own wiring is always as weird as it needs to be. I only ever wire my tone pot to my neck pickup for example. That and me using active circuits wherever possible tend to exclude most of the weird interactions that are judged as being "the character of..." or a plain old weirdness. Factor into this the "vintage" and the "modern" variants in how the tone pots are brought into the circuit.
  14. Post photos of the cavity and the switch wiring. It may be obvious from a visual inspection.
  15. It's a shame that people don't use underwound pickups as much for metal. They lose out on so much touch sensitivity and punch. Sounds good. I presume that was double-tracked?
  16. Agreed. In general the TL071 when run as a buffer without any sort of filtering will do a number of things to a basic pickup. Primarily it eliminates load on the coil, however as to the exact physics of this I am not the expert. This being said, a pickup that is heavily loaded becomes muddy and indistinct. "Smear-y" I guess I would say. A basic unity buffer allows a pickup to sound as it does naturally without losses from parallel resistances, cable capacitance creating a LPF that wools up the treble. That sort of thing. They also seem to reduce the tendency of the pickup to be prone to extraneous noise, especially when run as a pure differential amplifier without reference to ground. The negative commentary that many people repeat about actives is based around them hearing pickups without the artifacts that passive have, which a lot of us have become used to, and our equipment have grown up around. Fishman Fluence are great, however I think the HF Tilt is a drastically under-mentioned option for those that think actives have too much high end. It's simply that passive circuits commonly lose a lot of that and we are blissfully unaware. If it's adding clarity to the low mids, that's worth the price of entry alone. When that range gets smushed, everything gets messy and sounds "cheap".
  17. Sounds good! What are your observations on this version?
  18. Just saw this in my RSS feed. Might be of interest, going back to a previous conversation about traditional motifs and how the nature of materials and working methods have a direct relationship. https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/10/10/drawing-a-symmetrical-acanthus-leaf/
  19. Oh totally. This is why I find it so amusing that people get lost in high concept designs and weird stuff when really it comes down to basic balance, and even then....it varies. I'm biased though. My favourite acoustics have gloss over their Rosewood headstock veneers. The balances are completely different to that rustic Martin styling.
  20. It might be down to the nature of the playing or the recording, but it has a nice intimate voicing if that makes sense? A detailed and in-person sort of sound rather than a big booming projector. I suspect that's the recorder. I have to say, a gloss coat over the headstock would tie it together a little more. It seems out of place on some level. Call me crazy.
  21. It's very satisfying and important experience to figure out exactly how various contributions have altered and influenced the final instrument. All the buzzwords and repeated falsehoods on the Internet become meaningless by comparison. I look forward to how the comparison works out.
  22. I presume you saw the most recent Clickspring video on hand-engraving with a power engraver? Not so useful for wood applications, but interesting nonetheless.
  23. To be fair, I have zero idea any more. The motif is so common and in use beyond the context for which it bore specific meaning that it's almost like the Anglo-Saxon precursor to the "cool S". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S
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