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Post by ashcatlt on Feb 21, 2024 22:12:09 GMT -5
That’ll definitely do it, though you could also just put “to output” on A or “to pickup” on B and it would work exactly the same.
Turn down a 500K T pot to half its resistance (not necessarily halfway down) will sound the same as a 250K T pot, but there’s no way to get a 250K T pot to sound like a 500K.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 31, 2024 14:53:45 GMT -5
As long as you got all the wire colors right, and with the caveats you mentioned of orientation, it should work as you’ve drawn. There’s no good reason to switch the “ground” end of the pickups. They can all just stay connected. This way doesn’t hurt anything, but…
…If the split HBs hum-cancel with each other, one of them won’t hum-cancel with the middle. I suppose you have to decide how much that matters. If we had a free pole on one of those switches, we could automatically switch which coil gets shorted when one of the others is selected. There’d be decision to make, and you can never have all three coils him-cancel (1 + 1 - 1 != 0), but it might be desirable?
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 10, 2024 20:56:26 GMT -5
I know we're past this point, but... 2) Selector switch in center = Lower HB in series with upper HB, with the series pair in parallel with the lower HBThat's just shorting the top of the stack. Both ends of that upper pickup are connected together. You'll hear the lower by itself.
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Post by ashcatlt on Dec 21, 2023 22:48:38 GMT -5
So there may be some exceptions in this particular crowd here, but for most people the difference between a boutique hand-build and DIY is probably that the boutique builder has significantly more experience, possibly better tools, and likely a more refined workflow. You’re not probably buying their weekend hobby project or first try prototype. Not that I can afford that kind of thing. I just sort by price: lowest first.
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Post by ashcatlt on Dec 6, 2023 18:55:19 GMT -5
The top one is standard tele (neck-both-bridge) and with a separate P/P to split each pickup.
The bottom one is standard tele with the P/P one way (probably pushed) and then would be both-in-series/both-in-series/dead(jack open, probably noisy) with the P/P the other way. I think most of us would prefer a “series override” arrangement where it just puts both pickups in series no matter what the 3-way is doing. The other P/P inverts polarity of the bridge pickup in every position but will only really be noticeable in one of the “both” positions.
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Post by ashcatlt on Nov 30, 2023 21:46:53 GMT -5
I for one absolutely hate to “jam”. It’s either one dude spazzing all over never repeating anything so nobody has any chance to catch on or just devolves into Em blues which can be fun for a couple cycles but gets old quick.
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Post by ashcatlt on Oct 13, 2023 11:00:15 GMT -5
Errr…thought I had it for a minute…
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Post by ashcatlt on Oct 12, 2023 11:37:28 GMT -5
I think…
Well I can’t quite work out the specifics right now, but I think you can use one side of the 5-way for the bridge and neck pickups and then flip their phase on the way to the S/P switch. The middle pickup always wants to be grounded, so that can just be a permanent connection which kind of logically means it’s the others that need to get flipped.
Actually, do you even need to change the 5-way? Not really, I think, but it’s still too early…
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Post by ashcatlt on Oct 5, 2023 13:45:07 GMT -5
…you're essentially saying different amplifiers might display differences. (or so I understood you, anyway). Well, different systems could be different, but what I was kind of saying is that it’s only an issue if something else is broken. I think sumgai said that above.
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Post by ashcatlt on Oct 5, 2023 9:51:29 GMT -5
…no one to my knowledge has ever definitively proven that a hanging-from-hot condition causes extra noise… Have we not though? Have none of us ever plugged in a new mod and heard nothing but buzz just to find that we missed a ground connection? An unterminated guitar cable makes a noticeable amount of noise, and that’s far less effective an antenna than a big coil of wire. And then if the coil in question has a grounded metal cover but only two wires, touching the cover while hanging from hot would be about like touching the end of a cable (perhaps attenuated a bit, but at least enough to make you go wtf). Now, relative winding direction should matter in these cases in the same way and for the same reasons as in normal connections, so that leaving one coil of a humbucking pair hanging from hot should be less troublesome than if the were both pushing RFI in the same direction. Worth noting, too, that any connection in the middle of a series structure is basically a hot connection, and any coil hanging from that middle series connection is hanging from hot no matter which of its wires is making that connection. And that kind of brings us to hanging from ground. If the pickups and amplifier disagree on where ground actually is - there’s significant resistance between the what the coils call ground and the amp’s signal ground - then hanging from ground matters because it’s essentially hanging from the middle of a series structure, which… You’d kind of have to mess up pretty bad to make that happen inside the guitar, though I guess trying to make signal ground connection via the back of a pot would be a good way to start.
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Post by ashcatlt on Sept 21, 2023 21:54:56 GMT -5
Nobody use the inline division symbol after grade school. Nobody in their right mind uses slash notation unless they absolutely have to and when they do, they either use parentheses carefully to avoid ambiguity or they provide some statement about the convention they intend to follow. People who actually intend for their expressions to be calculated correctly don’t write them in such a way that “80% will get it wrong”. That is, these things are deliberately ambiguous mostly with the intent of driving engagement with their posts.
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Post by ashcatlt on Sept 21, 2023 21:40:12 GMT -5
…thought it said Womanized... I assumed we were talking about that Clapton thing at first.
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Post by ashcatlt on Sept 10, 2023 13:21:03 GMT -5
We’re aware that we can reply without quoting, yes?
If there’s a specific (shortish) part of a post that you want to zoom in on, especially maybe if it was few posts back, go ahead and quote just that part. If you’re replying to the most recent post, or really just continuing the conversation, we don’t need a quote. We currently have like half the thread quoted several times. We’re scrolling past the same thing over and over again to try and find the new contributions. I’d really appreciate it if y’all would go back and edit those posts, but if nothing else let’s stop this exponential expansion please.
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Post by ashcatlt on Sept 4, 2023 13:06:00 GMT -5
If it is just a passive piezo in the guitar, then yes. Use the T as the “hot output” from your magnetic pickup circuit just like whatever wiring you’re doing wants. Connect the piezo’s hot wire to the R. Both grounds to the S. When a TS plug is inserted, you’ll only hear the normal magnetic circuit. The piezo will be shorted, but that won’t hurt anything. When a TRS is inserted, the magnetic circuit is on the T (usually used for the left side of stereo) and the piezo will be on the R. A simple TRS to dual TS splitter cable (sometimes called an insert cable) will do the job to separate them out. There might be a tiny amount of crosstalk, but I’d be kind of surprised if it was actually noticeable in practice.
The piezo probably wants a very large impedance in order to pass all the lowest frequencies. A typical “high impedance” input intended for magnetic pickups might work, but these things often want more like 10M, which is why they usually have dedicated preamps. It’s worth a try straight into the Helix, but you might end up wanting something in between.
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Post by ashcatlt on Aug 17, 2023 20:58:39 GMT -5
You got me wondering if I'm seeing things or missing something or...something... It looks to me as though the B is always connected to output when the DPDT is flipped up. Also, I'm not sure those caps are really going to work the way you intend. In position 2, for example, the M is getting to the output by its connection to the bridge even without the cap. That cap is basically shorted and shouldn't really do anything. Position 3 and 5 are probably fine (except they're both B+), but then at 4, the M and N will connect together and then split through the parallel combination (capacitance sum) of those two caps on the way to the output. Also those caps are of course in series with the pickups when they are in circuit (and not shorted), so will have a highpass (bass cut) function. That's fine if it's actually what you want, but "cap tuning" is often the other way, where we try to tame the highs a bit with caps to ground. I'm sorry I don't have any suggestions for fixes at the moment, but I do think you should take another look.
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Post by ashcatlt on Aug 5, 2023 13:45:36 GMT -5
Oh yeah. If you’re playing a guitar into a distortion pedal without that natural loading, you can just turn down the guitar’s T pot and get that fuzzy fun.
Now, I did say “most of the way there”. Fuzz boxes do a thing when you roll down the V pot of a guitar. People will say that it “cleans up nicely”. I think at least part of what makes that work is that the V pot puts some series resistance between the pickup and the low inZ at the fuzz, partially isolating the inductance and basically shelving that high frequency energy back up. So it’s a little brighter going into the fuzz when you turn down a little bit. You can’t really get that from a static LPF, but if you’re just going for stoner metal or those singing fuzz leads that go all ring-mod-ish when you play double stops and stuff, just cut the treble before any distortion and you’re there.
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Post by ashcatlt on Aug 5, 2023 9:06:21 GMT -5
When you plug a passive guitar into a classic fuzz with its low inZ, it forms an LPF with the inductance of the pickup and that’s most of what separates fuzz from distortion. When the source is not inductive, that doesn’t happen naturally, so the fuzz is just distortion. Put a filter in between, now it’s a fuzz again.
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Post by ashcatlt on Aug 4, 2023 11:48:57 GMT -5
I mean, you could put a lowpass in front of the fuzz pedal and get most of the way there. Might be your keyboard has one built in?
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Post by ashcatlt on Aug 4, 2023 10:10:25 GMT -5
But often, the next pedal is getting its input from the low impedance output of a previous pedal, and that's all fine. Yeah I can’t believe newey and sumgai even went there with that. It’s a non-issue and they should both know better. This specific argument is one that I try to use when people start babbling about “reamp” boxes to “match” an audio interface output to an amp or pedal input. Do we put reamp boxes between pedals? No. Why? Audio “engineers” don’t know because they’re not Electronics Engineers anymore. They heard something about impedance once, didn’t understand it, and just keep parroting the same nonsense. In fact, I just yesterday commented on a vid from CS guitar where he was talking about Richie Blackmore running his guitar through a tape machine as a preamp before his amp, and this dude used a reamp box between them! I’m like, yeah I bet Blackmore didn’t have any such stupid thing. Impedance is not an issue…. …except your Fuzz Face probably won’t sound right because the source is not inductive so you won’t get the lowpass action from connecting a guitar to a “too low” inZ. In fact, the source is probably capacitive, so you might get a bit of highpass action instead. Probably not much, though, because “too low” for a guitar is still pretty high for something like a line input. Impedance isn’t the issue. Voltage (level) might be a little bit of issue, but it’ll probably only be like 9-10db hotter than a relatively hot guitar signal, and keyboards (and interfaces) usually have ways to adjust their output volume. Then ground loops, which really are best dealt with in other ways, but sure a transformer is a convenient way to not have to think about that. In short, yeah you’ll be fine. Pedal away.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 28, 2023 18:27:42 GMT -5
Honestly, if you change the keyboard, it suddenly becomes much more difficult to teach western music theory. One of the first lessons is often intimately tied to this whole question of where the black keys are and why. It’s a clear and easy illustration of the intervals in standard scales that we can build off of with new students. Yes, that’s kind of a backwards reason to keep it like that, but it sure is nice that we do have it.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 24, 2023 13:39:48 GMT -5
One of the main benefits of the arrangement of the keyboard is that you know what note you’re playing just by feel. We guitarists kind of have to look for the dots at least once in a while. Those poor orchestral string players don’t even get that much help. Keyboardists get it easy that way.
Also, double sharp is silly and would be extremely awkward to notate. Why not just add five letters to the alphabet and be done with the whole thing?
I’m not sure “tilting at windmills” is exactly the right phrase here, but honestly the fact that you disagree with the standard is not going to change it. If you intend to communicate coherently with western trained musicians, you’re gonna have to use their language. You can try to invent your own if you want. Maybe you’ll end up in a position where other people are forced to learn your new language. Nashville did it, why can’t you?
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 15, 2023 20:33:45 GMT -5
Can’t say how well it’ll work, but I’m reasonably sure you will get the best results you can just by treating that dummy coil like the ultimate signal ground In whatever scheme you choose to wire up. I probably would keep all shield grounds actually connected to ground, though.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 1, 2023 15:50:16 GMT -5
A bunch of lowpass filters is probably more CPU ticks and definitely more finicky than direct wave shaping.
I feel like you’d get just fine results if you start with a triangle and drive it into a sine function. Scale it going in (lower values will be more linear, higher values go through sine toward square) then clip it so the sine fiction doesn’t fold over, then sine, then “unscale” it.
output = (1/scale) * sin (pi/2 * max (-1, min (1, scale * triangle)));
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Post by ashcatlt on Apr 14, 2023 18:13:25 GMT -5
What size of cap are you recommending? I'm sorry, I wasn't recommending any specific value. It's a filter, so you need to know what frequencies you want to pass before you can decide the value. You might look at the value in something like Tube Screamer for an indication of a relatively lowish value (0.047uF) which "cuts" a bunch of bass (like 700Hz and below) at higher gain settings, BUT... ...the resistances in the Tube Screamer are much higher, like 20x higher, so you'd need to scale up the cap to compensate. BUT... This is the first time I actually looked at those R values, and 25K over 1K5 is kinda like not much gain hardly at all. Like, less than 20x vs the ~100x in the screamer. You're not necessarily trying to make a screamer clone, but I think it's a decent benchmark that people are pretty familiar with, and honestly is a bit low gain even, so I expect having this much less gain is going to lead to some disappointment of its own. Honestly, even for a clean boost it's gonna be a bit tame. Course, you can't go too far in a circuit like this because too much gain will actually cause it to start to clean up until you reach the point where the opamp itself clips, and then it's a whole other thing again. But so anyway, I guess the suggestion is maybe get a bigger gain pot, then figure out the cap value based on your desired cutoff frequency. If it helps, this is actually a shelving lowpass filter, so you can figure the frequencies using the equations for that. It's in the bizarro world of the negative feedback loop, so ends up working like a shelving high boost which boosts what the lowpass would have cut, but the frequency calcluations are the same. that's up to you, the designer. ninja'd! But we're saying basically the same thing, I think. Edit - But the link that thetragichero posted goes to a simple filter calculator which isn't quite exactly right for this. I always google til I find this picture: R1 is your gain pot, R2 is the Yogi's 1k5, C2 is the cap I'm proposing, and A (times -1) will be basically your maximum passband gain.
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Post by ashcatlt on Apr 14, 2023 15:08:15 GMT -5
Put a cap in series with that added resistor. It theoretically shouldn’t have DC gain, but in practice probably will. But also that cap can limit gain in the low frequencies. If the cap is big enough to not be heard, it’s still good hygiene to keep subsonic noise from messing things up too much, but you can also tailor that value to “tighten” the low end some, and you don’t have to go all the way to TS honk, but you could if you wanted.
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Post by ashcatlt on Apr 2, 2023 10:44:20 GMT -5
Have I never mentioned it?!? I’m totally a middle guy. When I actually have a middle pickup, I’ll use it probably 7 times out of 10. 2 of the remaining times would be B+N (parallel or series, depending) and the 10th would be the time I’m looking for some real special effecty sound so I’d use some other pickup or combination. But that’s like “in the studio”. If I’m playing live, I just leave it in the middle.
If there’s only two pickups, I almost always want them both on. Neck on its own is just boomy and muddy and Bridge alone usually has that nasal honky quality. The middle position is a nice balanced blend that I can work with.
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Post by ashcatlt on Mar 16, 2023 20:41:43 GMT -5
What freaks me out is when people say (out loud) something like “the third of the sixth…” It seems to be more common among a certain set of older Americans, and it takes me way too long to figure out. I asked you for your date of birth, not a fargin math word problem!
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Post by ashcatlt on Mar 15, 2023 19:47:41 GMT -5
Coding Train has for years done special challenges for Pi Day. I missed their post yesterday. Will have to check it out later. thecodingtrain.com/tracks/pi-day . . .Well, today is the Ides of March. Around here we celebrate with a bit of festival of tribute bands. The first time I played in it we chose to cover Big Black (I started bleeding halfway through, which is where my profile pic comes from) and we were so good that we have kept at it playing a show or two a year. This year we’re back in the Ides as the same band but covering songs by the Cure. It’s gonna be horrible.
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Post by ashcatlt on Feb 16, 2023 22:30:14 GMT -5
I think they need to start looking at replacing the CEOs with AI. You’ll save a whole lot more on payroll than replacing your staff illustrators.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 21, 2023 17:19:33 GMT -5
This is probably even more difficult to follow than newey's, but I'm pretty sure it does the automatic coil switching that I was talking about. I went with the SD colors for the HBs (though I don't know or care which is inner or outer or slug or screw, and if that stuff matters, it might need some restacking), but decided to color the SC wires to indicate which of the HB coils they match. Since that can go one of two ways, and it kind of matters, I went and provided both diagrams. In both cases, the M always cancels with the N. The B cancels with the N unless the M is on, then it cancels with the M instead. I've omitted the V and T and jack. I don't actually advise connecting wires "in mid air" like I've drawn them. You can choose any convenient lug to make those connections. The series link for the HBs, for example, can happen at the split switch, I just didn't feel like drawing two lines for each. The direction of the switches is probably weird. Toggles can of course just be rotated in the pickguard when you install it, but for the P/P, you'll want to think about which way is actually supposed to be up. I personally feel like darn near every guitar in the world switches pickups just by connecting or disconnecting the top of the coil, leaving the ground ends always connected, so don't see a good point in trying any harder than necessary. If you really want to use those unused lugs, you certainly can disconnect the bottom of the HBs also, but the SC would need another pole since I hijacked the one for the coil selection. Hope it helps.
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