JohnnyG

oops, looks like i grabed the wrong end of the stick lol. didnt realise exactlly what you were talking bout lol sry

General Guitar Gadgets has a Q filter circuit i think. not sure if its the same obne but it might be a good idea to check

been there done that lol a friend of mine wanted me to teach him some guitar licks, so at 10 in the morning (guven this is duringschool hols so we both normally got up at lunch) i went to his house with my guitar, went to his bedroom, hooked up and everything while he was still sleeping. and then promptlly blasted out some deftones goodness. he loved me for that lol

i normally just play my own stuff on my acoustic so its a little hard when someone asks me to play stuff lol. my fal backs are to just play some blues rock variation using 7th bar chords and pentatonic progresions oh and i can play Time of your Life by green day, its a pretty simple song to play and everybody knows it so its a good one lol

yeah the original idea was H-S-S but in retrospect ive decided that itd be quite good fun to have a true single coil only guitar. i need something for my punk and rock playing and the pickups on my kramer (quad rail humbucker in the bridge) is just way to metal for it really

pic of the body and neck, the guy just put them together and took a pic to send me Body and Neck

Young Boy:- Mummy, Mummy, When i grow up i want to be a luthier Mother:- Choose one son you cant do both

aaahhh ok i see now, many thanks my man

aaahhh, cheers very much for that saber, i was wondering if it may be a dil chip or sumat thanks very much im gonna look up the schematics for it (using the hand catalogue i have on my computer.......yes i reallyam THAT sad ) and if people want then i can chuck some info up here. i can already see this being useful for digitally switching stuff infact itd work for that wireless FX pedal someone was mentioning...... *Goes and gets lost in the wonderful fount of elecronics knowledgethat is the internet*

all Active picups actually do is to have less wire wound round the bobbin on the pickup and so a lower resistance (normally about 4 to 5 Kohms for a humbucker i think) this means they have a much cleaner signal but that its much weaker, (im not too sure on the clearer signal but i remember it has some pretty good things about having lower resistance) because the signal is weaker there is a built in pre-amp that is situated in the guitar. so what happens is the hot wire from the pickup goes into the preamp inside the guitar and then the output from the preamp goes to the pickup selector etc like a normal pickup. thats the only actual difference from passive pickups so they should get the extra "boost" if they were to have no volume or tone pots N.B. if ife talked bull anywhere in this post then please feel free to corect me iof anybody knows better. im not too sure about active pickups so i may not be quite right

bit of info on the actual project stuff lol have contacted the guy selling and given him my mailing address etc. he has actually been kind enough to give me a better quality neck that fits the body better which is really kind of him. his ebay name is ditninze and he's based in the reading so any UK guys looking for guitar parts may want to contact him looking forward to actually being able to start my first project

Keith seeing as you might be able to asnwer this ill ask you. is it posable to get electronically operated switches?? i realise solenoids are sort of like this but they're big and expensive. i was wondering if it was just posable to get say a small SPDT switch which could be operated by applying a voltage to a pin or summat cheers

Have a look at the schematic for the ultra clean power supply, you can add as many 9 volt sockets as you want to that (pretty much) just by having them in paralell. its not a particularlly hard circuit to make either (tho you will need to find a transformer from somewhere) electronics is really my main subject lol so stuff like this is what i mainlly design. im not gonna be building this for a while since most of my cash is going to be going towards my first project (which is going to be loaded with a fair bit of electronic wizardrry lol

i still have to remind myself that most of the people on here are grown men........wait.......no they're not, your all luthiers im loving the guitars. i dont htink i oculd posablly decide lol. I want them all

this is actually exactlly what ive been thinking of doing for a while now ive been planning on making the ultimate lead guitar FX rack unit. plan was to have sustain, delay, reverb (done by a proper slinky reverb tank) a treble boost and a 7 band EQ origional idea was also to have a seperate floor unit with foot switches on it to turn everything on tho Keith has brought up the good point of interference which i hadnt thought of before lol one thing you will have to bear in mind is that if you have a large circuit with say 5 different effects then you are going to need to power it and batteries just wont cut it (unless you dont mind changing them every week lol) you could just put a 9v adapter socket in the back and power it with a mains adaptor tho they have a tendancy to not be particularlly clean supplies (voltage spikes, not dead on 9v etc etc) and some FX dont like that, depends on what you have my idea was to actually have a transformer inside it and have a voltage regulation circuit inside it which isnt actually too hard to do (General Guitar Gadgets has a few schematics that show you pretty much everything you need) only tricky thing with that is playing around with mains voltage into the transformer which i find a little scary lol hope that helps you out

i realised as i was sitting in maths just now (like f**k id be working) that there is a really really easy way of doing this just put a diode the ground line just before it goes to the ground connection on the jack. that way when you plug the jack into the guitar, for the momentary second when the 9volts channel was touching the ground connection on the jack it wouldnt fry the electronics because the diode would stop it the voltage drop across the diode is negligable so it wouldnt effect the electronics inside and it would be very very cheap. im not planning on putting this into this guitar atm since its going to be my first project and making things too complicated to begin with is normally a bad idea. also i 9 volt battery would be fine since its just one effect i do have other ideas that this would be perfect for (im liking the idea of a big fat baritone scale 7 string with active pickups, some ridiculouslly crunchy distortion and a sustainer built in tho its a long way off)

lol yes that is easy but my engineering filled head wont let me take the easy option out lol plus id forget to do that one time, do it wrong and fry the electronics in my guitar. this needs to be idiot proof lol but the problem is that idiots are so ingenious

thatd be really easy to do. just get a Double Pole Double Throw micro switch. if you look at the switch from the bottom with the 2 rows of legs facing you lined up vertically then you just hook it up like this hot input lead from the pickup selector into the middle pole on the left side and then the output to the jack on the middle pole on the right side. the top 2 legs would be joined together (thats the bypass wire) and then the bottom left leg would go to the start of the tone/volume controls, the other end of the tone/volume controls would go to the bottom right hand leg. mount the switch and there's your control pot bypass switch.

this would be entirelly posable and really not that hard to do get 1 switch for each pickup. a on/off micro switch would be fine. solder the hot wire from a pickup to one tab on the switch and then have a wire from the other tab that goes off and joins the tabs form the rest of the switches....lemme rephrase that since it isnt clear imagine the switches have an input tab and an output tab. the hot wire fronm the pickups goes to the input tab, the output tabs are then joined together and would go (in this case) straight to the jack socket on the guitar when the switch was flicked on the 2 tabs of the switch would be connected, when it wasnt they would be disconnected meaning that you werent getting any output from that pickup. i hope thats clear lol, i cant think of an easy way to describe it atm 2 things to take into account 1) if you use switches get decent quality ones, otherwise you will get some crackles and pops from the switches when you flick them on and off 2) from what ive heard, if you have pickups without tone and volume controls then they can sound really bright. you might want to have a small resistor capacitor circuit inside the guitar just to take a little bit of the edge off them, course you may want bright pickups in which case ignore me hopethis is helpful man. if you dont get what i was rambling on about then tell me and ill draw a picture lol

John actually has a good point. i might have to sort something out to deal with that posabilities could be swapping the +9 volts and the ground of the lead around, that way the 9v channel on the lead would never be able to touch the inside of the guitar but that would pose problems with the box since the opposite would be true i coul;d always have a big capacitor in series with the output but then theres other problems..... im gonna have to give it some thought before i do it lol

thats exactlly what i mean about the stereo cable. on the stereo cable theres the tip, the midlle channel and then the ground, hang on ill try to draw it +9 Volts Tip/Signal | |~~~~ /:------I-----I------| \:------I-----I------| | |~~~~ Ground so the floor box that id make would do that just using some simple electronics, (i might even build a bit of an effect round it just to make it more useful) then in the guitar there would be another stereo jack: the hot signal wire with the pickup signal would connect straight to the tip, the ground in the guitar would connect straight to the ground on the jack and then whatever active electronics you had in ur guitar (FX like me or active Pups, maybe a sustainer even) would be powered from the second channel on the cable which would be the +9 volts. the good thing about this is that you wouldnt have to keep taking the pickgaurd/panel covers off to change batteries and you wouldnt have to worry about leaving batteries inside the guitar which could run down. infact, by using this you could get rid off batteries al together if you put a power adaptor socket in the floor box. the only real big draw back of this is that you need to make the floor box and you can only play the guitar through that tho you could have a switch on the guitar allowing you to choose between having the ghost power supply or a normal battery inside, wouldnt be that hard. i dont know if anybody has done this before but i remember someone mentioning it on the wireless FX thread, i think it was divided by james and he said it had been done with a Midi FX rack. tho as far as i know it hasnt ben done with a guitar. im probablly not going to do it yet since it'll cost a bit, the stereo cable alone will be a few bob to buy but if i make another guitar thats loaded with FX and stuff i may just have to do it

mkay it seems that i got sniped by 5 pence inthe last 10 seconds on the body i wanted, however, i did have another backup plan a plain black strat body, being soldby the same guy im getting the neck from so i suspect that they're fom the same guitar Neck Again New Body the body is straight black but that'll be stripped all for exactlly £101.1 not bad going methinks

OMG! Man, we could never get along ;-) I believe the Les Paul is absolutely without a doubt the sexiest, best all around solid body guitar design ever. It was designed after a womans body, you gotta love it! ;-) bOb Man she must have had a fatt ass then. i cant see the likeness tbh lol i really need to find stores near me that sell old guitars and amps, would make life so much easier

those are some really useful ideas man thanks im gonna be watching the auction closelly tonight lol so incase anybody does try to get in at the last minute ill hopefully be able to stop them. given that its quite a nice body id be willing to pay upto about £40 for it so we shall see. eventually when i get round to it i will have a powersupply system that doesnt have the batteries in the guitar. the idea is to use a stereo instrument cable and to make a small box that it plugs into straight out of the guitar. the cable would have the tip as the signal carrier, the second channel as the +9 volt supply and then the ground as ground obviouslly all sorted out by some very simple electronics in the box on the floor. its something that ill do in the future since it'll be an easy mod to do but for the moment ill stick with the onboard battery i see what you mean about the seperate volume knob for the humbucker and thats something that i think i might do since it wont be particularlly hard in some ways i like the push/pull pots since they keep a uniform look to the guitar but i find that trying to turn them on quicklly can be difficult so i might just stick with the normal mini switches. the other thing to bear in mind is cost lol and mini switches i can get for free from school the idea of the skull knobs and the glowing eyes is a damn cool one as is the fretboard tho i dont think theyd be for this guitar. if i make one in future i may have to do that tho (im thinking something ridiculouslly metal and black ) the pickgaurd idea is brilliant and im definatelly gonna use it. since this is my first project i will almost certainlly be changing things with it which is why i wanted the inserts in the first place. the nuts would do the job perfectlly and it would be really easy to do. only problem i could see with it is how to secure the nuts well incase they get overtightened but i reckon some superglue should hold them in for the moment im fairlly sure im just going to do solid colours and not bursts tho i have been thinking about putting racing lines on this. atm its either red with yellow lines or vice versa lol many thanks again for the help man. thats really useful JG

I am currentlly in the process of gathering all the parts im going to need for my strat project and its looking pretty good. my friend with an ebay account has bought a neck off their for me and has high bid on a body that ends this evening so its looking good. heres the neck, Neck seems to be a good one and its got a coo skunk stripe in the back so for £35 + p+P im not complaining the body that ive got my eye on is a super strat so its already got the humbucker bridge pup slot routed which is perfect for me. the interesting thing is that its made out of mahogany not alder which is also perfect for me since i dont like overlly bright sounds on guitar. the other amusing thing is the current colour which im tempted to just strip straight off and strat the paint from scratch Body the only other things ive done so far have been to draw up circuit diagrams and design the circuit borad for the Fuzz Face that im going to be having inside the guitar (circuit board is about 5 cm by 6 cm). i figure that if im gonna build a guitar then i should make it my own and built in FX appeals to me lol. so current spec is as thus strat style for trem, scale length, frets etc pups gonna be H-S-S with coil splitting on the hum 1 master volume and 1 tone pot Fuzz Face controls will consist of a micro switch to turn it on and off, a red LED indicator for on/off and then a pot to control the fuzz and a seperate volume control. there will also be a kill switch and as well as that im going to use a stereo jack on the guitar and rig it up so that the power can only be on when a cable is plugged in. only other design features are gonna be a metal pickgaurd which will be anodized a colour so that as well as looking cool it wont corrode or anything. im also thinking of having screw inserts so that the pickgaurd can be taken on and off multiple times without having to worry about the holes in the wood getting eaten away the only thing i cant decide is the colour of the actual guitar body