JohnnyG

I recentlly purchased the marshal jackhammer and i feel i must say that i actually want it to have my children. i love it. its got distortion on it which is franklly quite crap, however the overdrive is soooo nice i almost wet myself. i can go from an old bluesy warmth through bright punky tones and right into big phat metal crunch, all with just a couple knob twidles. if anybody is thinking of an overdrive pedal then i cannot recommend this enough. while i was buying it i also blew some xmas cash on a set of planet wave cables and its definatelly money well spent. nehu, i have to get back to playing

the upper one has no standard Pups. might be piezo mounted. switch guitars for different sounds i think

hm this could be useful. all i really need to do is find somewhere that i can buy half decent necks for not too much now lol

thinking about it i think that having gear wheels instead of dot inlays would look damn cool. either that or having a large cog somewhere else on the guitar infact, ive just had a neat idea (that i wont be able to do tho someone with some skills might) how about inlays around the control knobs on aguitar. eg you get chrome metallic knobs on the pots and then around that you could have the inlay of a cog or wheel or even just a cool looking inlay. that may look pretty neat

ur dad knows his stuff lol. ill have to have a better look at that site soon.

the guitar im looking to put the pickup in is just a normal nylon string folk guitar and id quite like to keep it that way. the pickups ive seen on stew mac that i liked the look of were the transducers that sit under the bridge saddle http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics,_p...ine_Pickup.html for example. i figure it would probablly be easier to get someone who new what they were doing to install it for me tho lol. i dont want to have to get too much work done to the guitar however at the same time i dont want to end up with a pickup that sounds poor.

sry slight misunderstanding, by silly i meant silly as in far far too good. not silly as in stupid. anybody who can cover a Bach concerto for harpsichord (cant remmber the exact name of this piece) using a bass guitar is far beyond talented i think lol

ive seen the hammond boxes and they are very nice tho atm i havnt quite got the cash for them lol. the other problem i mentioned is the switches. if you want to have true bypass and an LED ON/OFF indicator then you can either get Triple Pole Single Throw heavy duty foot switches ($15 each is the cheapest you'll get them) or you can use the millenium bypass method which isnt that difficult to sort out but requires a little bit of know how. evven if you do sort that out then you need the normal DPDT foot switches which are about $5 to $10 each and then theres shipping ontop of that. the electronics of stomp boxes is pretty easy and cheap. its the casings and switches/pots where you spend the most LoveKraft i know the channel splitter is easy. i can design the entire thing myself without too much fuss. the plan would be to just have a passive channel splitter and then have a booster with variable gain for each channel. the mixer is very easy to make by just using an op-amp. thinking about it, if people want i could probablly do a tutorial on the basics of guitar and FX box electronics. just to explain stuff like frequency filters, the basics of distortion etc. i realise that most of this is available on the web and that there are a few people here who already know alot more about this than me but i figure that some folk may find it useful. any takers?

i have to say that im suprised only one person has said Jaco Pastorius. my friend who plays bass (upright and guitar) got me to listen to some of his stuff and franklly alot of it is just plain silly

the real problem i hav (and the reason i havnt built any FX yet) is getting cases and switches for them. i could really do with finding somewhere that icouldget old non working FX from andthen just canibalize them lol i currentlly have loads of ideas for some wierd ass but cool things among others ive got thiscrazy idea for a box that splits up the frequency spectrum of your guitar into different channels which can then be mixed back together with another box. this would mean you could do crazy things like have heavy distortion on the lower frequencies, a flanger on the mids and then delay on the high frequencies (for example, i duno if that would sound good but u get the idea) it wouldnt even be that hard to design lol i love being geekeh

I currentlly have an acoustic guitar and i would very much like to put a pickup in it to add a bit more to its versatility. can anybody recomend a pickup that would be good for the job and wouldnt require too much modification to put in. i realise that im going to have to drill a hole for the output jack and so i was also wondering whether i would need to reinforce the area around it from the inside as always all help is apreaciated cheers guys

im guessing that your thinking about a distortion pedal that used actual tubes in it ye (if not then please correct me) i have done alot of reasearch into guitar FX and amps and while im no expert i think i have enough knowledge to give you some pro's and cons to this idea ill start with the cons the biggest of these is quite simplly that tubes need mains power supply to get them to work. this means that if your building it yourself youd better know what you're doing lol secondlly you should know something about the way that tube distortion is created. in an amp there will be (very basically) a pre-amp and a power-amp. the power amp is built so that there is a maximum signal that it can take before it begins to distort. the pre-amp set up so that the amplification it gives can put the signal above and below this value. (sry if im being patronising but its just easier to make sure people know the basics) on an amp when you change the gain you're changing the amplification of the preamp. high gain means high amplification on the preamp which means a large signal is sent into the power amp. this means that the tube in the power amp will be "overloaded" and so will distort what this all means in short is that if you are trying to do this then you may as well go the whole way and just build a tube amp. i will just quicklly list the pro's of this so as not to totally discourage you. tube distortion just sounds nice. there is no denying it it would be damn good fun to do (the entire basis for me doing electrical engineering at uni is so i can go build guitar FX and amps because its fun lol) itd be damn impressive as well if you are looking to research guitar FX then 1 place i will point you towards is General Guitar Gadgets http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/v2/ if you check the links section as well then there are loads of useful sites from there one last thing i will point out to you is this article. its on general guitar fx but its very useful so ill link to it anyway http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/v2/ric...tion/index.html all about designing your own distortion pedals hope that all that helps JG

one of the thingsthat i have been thinking about which is partially along the same lines. imagine if you had a guitar with a wireless transmitter built into it. so there was no output jack. imho ithink it would be pretty cool. only problem i can see with it is that you would have to keep loads of spare batteries in order to play it lol since i think that wireless units eat them

saber thats a damn good idea. thats a really really good idea actually. im gonna have to design something to work with that. a stomp box that works as a powersource and a booster or sumat. yay, more electronics circuits to design

im actually looking for exactlly the same thing as you lol. only difference is that i want 24 frets and probablly a rosewood fret board. i live about 45 mins from london so im tempted just to go up to denmark street and cruise around looking for old guitar parts rofl.

im not toohot at designing logos tho if ur looking for somehing to start with, try this http://home.worldonline.dk/nyskes/bbowl/bb...ics/Badmoon.jpg its the logo from the badmoon orcs in warhemmer 40k (yes i used to be a warhemmer geek lol, i only really collected them to paint the modelswhich i was damn good at) have a search on google images for somethings to give you some inspiration

building amps is much like building guitar FX in that the hardest part is not so much building the ciorcuit (unless you're designing it of course) but its making something to put it in the circuitry has to be contained in an all metal chassis to cuty out alot of the interference and background noise you'll get. this is alot hgarder than youd think. this is the main reason that not too many people build their own asmps/FX course if you can get some old beaten up and broken FX and amps then you can just tear out the old stuff in those and put ur new stuff in lol

man thatd be sweet. the firsttime i sawthat finish was a green on white one on a les paul. i almost wet myself lol

there are some people who have boards and skate im current;y one of the top ranked freestyle skaters in the UK. appeared in the november issue of sidewalk mag lol ifanybody actually wants to see it then ill post the links up here to where ive uploaded a scan of the article lol. there's a sequence of me doing a trick that im seriouslly chuffed with lol

Yo man im actully in the same boat as you since im quite into home made FX/amps/general lectronic tinkering lol have fun here lol btw where you at in the UK?

Bingo im with you, i use ernie ball power slinky's (11s) because my guitar is tuned down a step to D and more oftenthat not its in drop C lol. heavy gauge strings and detunedguitar makes itsound a lot nicer. i hated my guitarwhen it had 10s and was tuned to E, it was just nasty and janglly

Bluesprescence, by crackle finish i assume you mean like a couple of the finishes on here http://www.musicyo.com/callouts/kramer_finishes.asp cracked green and cracked yellow at the bottom? if thats the way you do them then thats great since ive been wondering how the hell you get such a cool finish for ages. im thinking that i have the basis for another project forming

good to hear. peoplestill havnt realised that a mullet is a fish not a haircut. wearing one on your head and waving it about is not only very silly but it also smells. btw, what the hell kinda headstock have you got planned for that?? i cant posablly imagine what itcould be lol

the only stuff you couyld ever posablly play on that without looking very out of place would be a ridiculous spinal tap-esque 500 bpm tapping solo. even then you would have to be wearing tight leather trousers, a black t shirt and you would absolutelly have to have a mullet

if i were making the guitar for myself then i would make each guitar as sweet as possible course the other thing to do would be to do a set. eg do 3 guitars all with the same style top/finish etc but do one as a tele, one as a strat and one as an LP. a mini series if you will lol. would look pretty sweet