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Post by ashcatlt on Jul 6, 2022 19:20:24 GMT -5
Yeah I use the middle pickup pretty regularly, even when I also have N+B (S or P) available. It’s pretty unusual for me to use either N or B alone on any guitar, actually, and I almost never use the “quack” combinations. Frankly, I could live just fine with a single pickup in the middle position most of the time.
I also never use the pots on my guitars at anything other than the extremes, so would probably replace them with switches (rotary or otherwise) to do…something. Probably use 4-wire HBs and have individual switches for series/parallel, but idk.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 23, 2022 21:31:01 GMT -5
The guitar pickup, as a transducer, as no compression at all (until it overheats and fails, anyway) I agree in general with everything you’ve said, and in actual practice I’m sure no actual string movement will push a pickup into its nonlinear region. I do wonder, though, how it compares or relates to the fairly well known phenomenon of transformer saturation. That can usually be measured and heard well before the transformer burns. I know the action is not exactly the same, but like kind of, no?
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 21, 2022 14:34:54 GMT -5
When you say “nasal”, I immediately think maybe you’re just getting more of the bridge pickup in the mix than you’d really like. You might try adjusting pickup heights to see if you can balance that out better.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 17, 2022 21:24:11 GMT -5
You of course can’t do S/P with a standard Strat 5-way, and the only other interesting thing to do with the fifth position is probably series out out of phase, which is not something most people would use all that often, sooo… …my suggestion would be sumgai’s version of the Baja tele 4-way wiring guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/5073/switch-gives-series-parallel-combosWith three pots you’d have master volume and then tone for each pickup. The tone pots would want to be wired directly across their pickups which is different from in the link, but allows you to get “broadbucker” tones in the series combination.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 17, 2022 21:12:54 GMT -5
The difference between split and parallel wired humbucker is kind of subtle. The parallel will tend to be slightly brighter, but maybe not so’s you’d know the difference unless you actually a/b them. The big difference will be that the parallel connection maintains the hum-cancelling, so there will probably be significantly less noise that way. The scheme you posted is as good as any other if that’s what you’re shooting for.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 8, 2022 10:15:22 GMT -5
Well…sort of??? We often talk about Impedance as though it was just one simple number, but it’s actually complex. And I mean complex as in there are imaginary numbers involved, but also as in it’s usually frequency dependent. The things that one might do to change the impedance of a coil could also change the frequency response. So that kind of brings up the question of what you mean by “equal/similar voltages”. But maybe I’m thinking too hard on that. Rickenbacker single coils use fewer turns of smaller wire in order to get hotter overall output without quite so much inductance.
Edit - So but honestly I’m not sure how far you can practically take it. You can change impedance by changing number of turns or wire gauge, but that also changes voltage output. You can try to compensate for that by changing the strength of the magnet, but I’m not sure how far you can really go with that to create a significant Z difference while keeping V about the same.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jun 4, 2022 10:33:58 GMT -5
But in series, its just an addition, a sum of the two signals. Impedance doesn't really play into the series situation except to the extent that the impedance is tied to the actual signal level. In a string-sensing coil, the output voltage usually rises with the impedance, but if you can get the same actual voltage out of a smaller Z, then the signals will balance out despite the Z difference. You can look at the parallel connection as a voltage divider. Or, I guess, two voltage dividers. From the perspective of one pickup, it is the "top resistor" and the other coil is the "bottom resistor". Each pickup's contribution is divided down by the appropriate ratio and the results are added together. The smaller impedance is divided down less than the bigger one because that's how voltage dividers work.
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Post by ashcatlt on May 23, 2022 19:27:40 GMT -5
It'll definitely work. The taper will change, but who's gonna notice enough to complain?
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Post by ashcatlt on May 21, 2022 12:38:01 GMT -5
Did you take the stereo pedal out of the system? I feel like the active split in that was important to this working at all.
Edit to underline: There is NO actually acceptable full passive solution here. You really want a buffer before the split for guitar tone purposes. You really want a buffer on each side of the split. You’d like to have a buffer after V pedal so it’s outZ matches the dry side. You need mixing resistors to isolate the sources from each other and keep the buffers from fighting to the death (they won’t actually hurt each other). You want an active mixing stage after that. The mixing resistors will drop voltage, so you’ll want makeup gain somewhere along the line. In my mind, proper gain staging says get that as early as possible which is probably at the buffer before the split, assuming that doesn’t distort the looper.
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Post by ashcatlt on May 8, 2022 13:24:03 GMT -5
That is, have the looper's output going into the volume pedal's output and take the actual output (that's being mixed with the direct signal) from the volume pedal's input. Yep. Literally just plug it in backwards.
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Post by ashcatlt on Apr 12, 2022 7:46:12 GMT -5
DC doesn’t pass a capacitor because that’s how capacitors work. I’m not super into the explanations that tell you how the electrons actually flow and I don’t much care for the hydraulic analogies. A capacitor has an impedance that looks small at high frequencies and gets large as the frequency gets lower. At 0Hz (DC), it should be infinite. A lot of what we use caps for (in active circuits more complex than our passive guitars) is blocking DC from going where we don’t want it.
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Post by ashcatlt on Apr 8, 2022 18:42:08 GMT -5
…luthier uses denatured alcohol while the musician uses grain alcohol Back when my live rack weighed more than I was willing to lift alone, we had a joke that we would add wheels and a motor/generator that used ethanol for fuel so we could buy our drummer drinks with the rest of the band.
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Post by ashcatlt on Apr 2, 2022 10:12:15 GMT -5
There is no such thing as AC or DC cap. It’s just a capacitor. An AC signal with peak-to-peak voltage of 63V gives an RMS voltage a little over 40V, which is probably what that spec is trying to say.
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Post by ashcatlt on Mar 22, 2022 7:38:33 GMT -5
The short answer is no. When people say Half Out of Phase, they generally mean some arrangement with a capacitor so that only the higher frequencies from the one pickup get flipped and the low end stays in phase. Flipping one coil of an HB causes that pickup’s output to cancel almost completely, so that you’ll end up hearing basically just the other pickup. It probably won’t have much if any of the OoP character, and would essentially be redundant to the pickup selector.
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Post by ashcatlt on Mar 11, 2022 16:20:16 GMT -5
If you don’t use that tape setup as a some form of effect, I’m going to cry.
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Post by ashcatlt on Feb 19, 2022 21:33:37 GMT -5
Note that I didn’t say to desolder anything. In this one specific case, the capacitor itself isolates the pot from the circuit so that all you need to do is measure the pot itself. One or the other of the connections from the jack is “outside” the cap - current has to go through it to get to the pot. Measure “inside” the cap, and you’ll be fine.
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Post by ashcatlt on Feb 19, 2022 20:15:09 GMT -5
Is the other end of that cable plugged into the jack? You can’t measure a T pot that way. The meter applies a DC voltage, which can’t flow through the capacitor. What usually happens when you measure DCR through a cap is the value will start very low and rise as the cap charges up and eventually approach infinity. Of course that whole thing is in parallel with about everything else in the guitar, so as the cap starts to look big, you end up just measuring the parallel total of that other stuff. Now, if the V pots are all the way up, I’d expect it to read something close to the DCR of whichever pickup is selected.
Most components want to be removed from the circuit - at least disconnected at one end - before you measure them. In the case of a T pot, it basically is disconnected at the one end, so if you actually get in there and measure from the “inside” of the cap, you could probably get a rational reading.
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Post by ashcatlt on Feb 13, 2022 11:33:36 GMT -5
Just to make sure everybody is as confused as possible, I thought I’d pop in and point out that Everything Useful Is A Voltage Divider. Yes, that includes the Tone pot. “But we don’t use all three lugs...” Well no, the T pot is a variable “bottom resistor” in a voltage divider where the “top resistor” is the impedance of the pickup. That “top resistor” is relatively small (compared to the T pot at 10) at lower frequencies, but it gets big fast for higher frequencies. At some frequency, it’s big enough to cause significant division with the T pot. As you reduce the T pot, that frequency gets lower. But anyway, no part of that T pot is ever in series with the signal going to the output jack. The series resistance discussed above is the top half of the V pot as it’s turned down, and what that does with the T pot is going to be the same whether that T is one 250K or 500K parallel to two 1M. It’s still 250K either way when the pot is at 10. As you turn it down, that gets lower, and you have the same range of lower values either way, though they may be at different points in the rotation. The taper is different, but the value is the same, and the overall action is the same. Anyway, swapping out the T pot definitely will not make your guitar louder no matter what, so if that’s what you’re trying to achieve, probably skip it. Turning down the V pot definitely does make the guitar quieter, though. You’ve said you like to turn that down to kill treble, which happens because the top part of that pot ends up as the top part of a divider whose bottom part is the capacitance of the cable, which looks small at high frequencies, but that’s on top of the broadband division you get from the divider in the V pot itself. If you want more broadband volume and less treble, turn the V pot up and the T pot down, or swap out the T pot for something smaller than the 250K so you can just leave them both all the way up. Or just buy a booster pedal. But realize that the tone you like with your amp at 7 WILL change when the input gets louder. At least, if you’re saying you get exactly the amount of overdrive/distortion/saturation/crunch/whatever that you want when the amp is set to that particular amount of gain, well, adding gain at any stage is going to change that, so... Buy a bigger amp.
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Post by ashcatlt on Feb 5, 2022 10:03:00 GMT -5
A 500K pot parallel to the SC might make it a bit brighter than many people would like, so some people will put another 500K resistor parallel to that in order to reduce the total value and bring the cutoff frequency down. 500K in series with about any source will kill a bunch of treble, create pretty big broadband attenuation while also adding a bunch of noise.
If the intention was to make the V pot look like a 250K to the SC, just strap the R across the phase switch and get to the super witch with a wire. The partial split is weird to me, but it’s not as damaging. You will want to tune that by ear, but I suppose the range covered by a 10K pot is probably about what you’d want to shoot for.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 19, 2022 18:11:22 GMT -5
Idk about this one, but I know some guitars like this have a non-adjustable metal bar inside the neck.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 15, 2022 18:00:38 GMT -5
BRIDGESeries = 13.57k Split = 7.22k I know y’all have moved on, but I had the idea that this might be partly because of the V pot in parallel while taking readings. That would tend to affect the value that is closer to the pot value more. Running the math with these numbers and a 250K pot, I get actual values of 14.3 for the HB and 7.2 for the split, which is much closer than half. Neither is even close to the 16K and 8K from the first post, but I’m probably missing something there.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 8, 2022 18:12:33 GMT -5
When I said “class D watts are different from analog”, it was maybe a bit lazy.
First of course class D amps are technically analog, so I guess probably more like as opposed to more traditional class A or class A/B.
But also it’s kind of that same thing we’ve had for years where you have to know exactly what the manufacturer (or marketing department) means by “watt”. Is that peak-to-peak or RMS? Is it like total available “surge” power that it can supply every once in a while without exploding, or is it maximum continuous average that it can handle before thermal protection kicks in? Perhaps more importantly, the question is exactly how much distortion was allowed in the calculation. We’ve known for years that the wattage rating on a car stereo amplifier probably has higher THD tolerance than say a hi-fi amplifier, but that consumer stereo equipment is still probably a bit looser in its spec than a reference amp for studio use, and from what I’ve seen and read, it seems like most of the people selling class D amp allow for quite a bit more distortion than other amps.
But kind of almost conversely, I think that actual tube amps are specified kind of low. That is, their ratings are often quoted at a level of THD that very few guitarists actually shoot for. Most of what we like about tube amps is the distortion. Even a relatively clean sound often actually has a lot more rounding of peaks than we’d ever accept in a hi-fi or PA. If we start talking about actual crunch, overdrive, and especially when we talk about high gain metal type sounds, we end up way past that lowish THD spec pretty quick. The RMS average of a sine wave with a given peak level (a proxy for a signal that just barely reaches our limit) is half the square root of 2 times the RMS of a square wave with the same peaks (which is about as distorted as you can get*), which means the square wave’s average is ~1.4 times that of the sine. BUT the saturation curve gets noticeably curvy (THD goes beyond spec) somewhere around 6db down from the actual limit. So, that dimed 100W Marshall or Mesa or 5150 could well be pushing over 200w RMS of raging brutal metal madness into the speakers...
Or something like that.
*Yes, we're aware that real amps can't actually give us square waves, but it doesn't much change the basic point.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 8, 2022 16:02:17 GMT -5
I guess this matters more in things like mic preamps and mixed circuits. One might look there for inspiration. If you really care about exact settings and especially repeatability, the best answer is probably a stepped attenuator - literally a switch which goes between carefully calculated Rs.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 7, 2022 14:35:46 GMT -5
Yeah. I mean, I think you could get more for cheaper. Frankly that just looks pretty small to me. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I would wonder just a little bit about low end extension, and I would definitely take that "2000W peak power" with a big chunk of salt. Class D watts aren't really the same as analog watts. At best that would be absolute maximum peak power with some relatively high % of THD. You won't be able to get anything like that for actual program power. At a more fundamental level, power ratings in general don't really tell us much about how loud a thing is going to be. That depends almost completely on the efficiency (more commonly called sensitivity) of the drivers but also can be influenced by the design of the cabinet itself. The only real spec that matters is the actual SPL measurements, and I haven't been able to find that for this unit. Not that I tried all that hard. I was a little flip above re: my PA speakers, but honestly that 1000W thing (which is actually a full 15"+horn "main" type, but cost me about $100 less than this thing) - while plenty loud for me to get raging feedback in my living room and even want to wear headphones to "protect" myself from the assault - can sort of just barely keep up as a dedicated guitar amp in a loud live band kind of context. It is definitely more directional than most guitar cabs, so that it's REALLY LOUD if you point it right at your face, but as you move off axis, it drops off pretty fast - treble first of course. I think what I'm saying is that yes, you should look at that sort of FRFR speaker, but I would avoid things specifically marketed toward guitarists. There are plenty of options that will likely get you more power (and actual SPLs), possibly better frequency response, and probably more features (mine all have bluetooth, USB, SD, microphone inputs...) for the same if not less money.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 6, 2022 18:15:20 GMT -5
an amp sim through headphones or a sound card just won't cut it. I want to crank my Peavey to 11 I’ve got a 1000W powered PA speaker for that. If that’s not louder than your Peavey, I’ll grab one of my three others. If that’s still not enough, we could go downstairs and plug into the big Bose system.
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Post by ashcatlt on Jan 2, 2022 16:30:12 GMT -5
I feel like you'd ought to be able to get balanced output just by letting the pickup float. The bottom of the coil goes to the negative wire, top to positive, and the "ground" wire in the cable is connected to whatever shield ground point you've got in the guitar. V and T would be connected across the coil.
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Post by ashcatlt on Dec 23, 2021 16:42:07 GMT -5
The knobs on my heater do not actually turn potentiometers. The action is 100% mechanical. The one I replaced in my Ford Focus a few years back looked like this Different vehicles may be different, but I tend to think that unless they are actually digital, most will be mechanical like this. That’s not to say you couldn’t maybe adapt the knobs to fit a pot, but...
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Post by ashcatlt on Dec 23, 2021 15:07:32 GMT -5
I can see where those sentences would be tough to parse for non-native speakers. Those of us who are fluent and at least passing familiar with colloquial speech know what he meant without trouble. Believe it or don’t, I just now realized the irony here. It’s literally just paraphrasing “Just cause you don’t understand...” So then cynical1 brings up Yoko, and that’s...well it’s an argument I’ve had a couple times recently what with that new doc series going on. Her influences draw largely from a foreign tradition, and while she definitely leans way experimental, much of it is actually quite intelligible from the perspective of her cultural roots. Most of the hate she gets really is just racism and misogyny. I personally would rather listen to her than her husband, and so would most of my friends. I posted this in reply to somebody’s fb post not long ago. People laughed at me, but then the OP came back with this article from the NYT, none of which is really news to me: www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/arts/music/yoko-ono-beatles-get-back.htmlFor my part, I never really claimed to make music. Plenty of people have told me that what I do is not, so fine, it’s not. Not going to stop me from doing it.
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Post by ashcatlt on Dec 22, 2021 21:41:20 GMT -5
I can see where those sentences would be tough to parse for non-native speakers. Those of us who are fluent and at least passing familiar with colloquial speech know what he meant without trouble.
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Post by ashcatlt on Dec 22, 2021 19:45:48 GMT -5
Oh come on guys. It really was pretty cool. The kind of angular melodies, unusual harmonic motion, and off-kilter rhythms that I find very interesting. Parts of it felt kind of like Beefheart, some of it almost reminds me of Television, but really it’s fairly tame for contemporary experimental classical stuff. I’m not sure what pyrroz was saying, but I think they asked me to cover Suicidal Tendencies( ?). That’s not likely to happen any time soon, but this is kind of relevant: “Just 'cause you don't understand what's going on Don't mean it don't make no sense And just 'cause you don't like it, don't mean it ain't no good”
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