Sustainer thingy

[yosefu]

Hi you all!

I'm a poor guitarist who once got interested in the field of microtonality so I could starve as badly as Harry Partch did. With this purpose I built myself a fretless guitar with which I'm partially happy, but I miss some polyphonic sustain. Something like a fretless Moog guitar would make me happy, but the price is really out of my range.
So being a total noob in electronics I'm starting to build a hex pickup and sustainer, with pacience

However I'm trying first with only one string to see if it works. I built a Little Gem amp and it seems to work. I feed it with the signal from the normal pickup. Then I took the coil out of a 8ohm speaker and feeded it with the signal coming out of the Little Gem. It seems to be working since if I hold it close to the pickup it makes this high pitched sound of feedback gone crazy. But it doesn't make the string vibrate.

I've tried putting a nail with a magnet through the hole of the coil and then have it close to the string, but no magic seems to be happening. I feel like I might be missing something important because of my noobility in electronics, but I believe it has more to do with the driver coil than with the amp.

Anyone of you has tried something similar in the past?

Many thanks in advance

[guitarist345]

hey why not use a fernandez sustainiac pickup.. amazing sustain. u can control the amount of harmonic frequence too... why not give a try on it once coz am sure u will not just like it but love it forever... check it out... people like steve vai, joe satriani, eddi van halan, and many legends used these.... they r actually a device..

[cynical1]

Being a poor musician probably precludes the whole Fernandes or Sustainiac route.

Can you afford some marine epoxy resin and a case of sandpaper?

I did fretless basses back in the day and used marine expoxy resin on the fingerboards to harden them up and make them resistant to round wound strings once the frets were gone.



There are many brands out there and the new stuff actually allows for a retarding agent to be used to allow it to dry slower and level better.  From my experience, 6 coats is the magic number.  Count on at least two to three weeks of your life vanishing in the process, though... 

It does require the ability to work fast...and sand forever...but it yields the hardest surface you're going to get on a fretless guitar or bass, aside from the weird metalized fingerboard that Vigier uses on their Excalibur Surfreter line.



Remember, after pulling the frets the setup on the guitar\bass needs some radical tweaking. The nut and bridge need surgery, and your pickup heights will need to come down, too. With practice you can increase the sustain, but you're never going to get what you had passively once the frets are gone.

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[4real]

guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/5318

This kind of thing is not for the novice, nor to be discussed on an open forum these days, but email me of PM to discuss it...

[sbgodofmetal]

Have you concidered an ebow??? They are very inexpencive to diy!

This is what it sounds like with an ebow circuit