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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 11, 2018 9:42:36 GMT -5
That was a sweet deal. I am envious - I love doing that type of stuff and the work you did on them looks great.
Low cost and great results are always inspiring to me. I hate seeing things go to landfill where they can be converted into valuable assets with the application of some skill and effort.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 4, 2018 12:14:11 GMT -5
From up here in the Great White North (a.k.a Canada):
I hope you celebrate your fabulous country with pride today. We celebrated Canada Day here only a few days ago on July 1st.
We Canadians can appear smug at times but we cannot expect to match the huge list of achievements that the US has and we should be proud of our friendly neighbors to the south of us, as you all should be. We are very blessed to share North America together, with the abundance of resources and the freedoms that we all have within our two societies. We could not expect to have better neighbors (spelled 'neighbours' up here), and it really is just like we are one big family.
I would not have it any other way, and living here together with “ya’ll” is truly as good as it gets on this planet – Trump or no-Trump.
To our very, very good friends: Enjoy your celebrations!
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 27, 2018 15:26:35 GMT -5
Well, I certainly cannot argue with the results you all have seen. I will accept that odd numbers of coils can be configured to cancel hum.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 27, 2018 14:26:56 GMT -5
I cannot see how it can 'buck the hum' since it cannot be balanced. You can get pretty closed to perfectly balanced in a three-coil configuration if you use a series-parallel arrangement. The two like-polarity (magnetic) coils are put in series with each other. The dissimilar coil is placed in parallel with that combination. To understand this concept it's necessary to visualize the two series-connected coils as two voltage sources with two impedance elements in series. The output of those have one impedance (the parallel connected coil) in parallel with the output. The impedances form a voltage divider. The division ratio is 1z/3z. Multiply that by the voltage of two sources in series. For the one coil in parallel, we evaluate that as one source which has 1z in series and 2z in parallel with the output. The division ratio is 2z/3z. Multiply that by the single voltage. iirc, JohnH described this on a few occasions and alluded to it in his first reply on this thread. Of course this assumes all coils have the same impedance. From the specs of the Triplebucker, we know that's not exactly true. But close enough that we can expect the hum-canceling will be quite good. Regarding hum, higher impedance will also mean a slightly greater hum contribution (voltage), but less net output because of the increase of series resistance. Hmmm - I would expect the signal strength of the 'hum signal' to be double when coming from the two series coils compared to the inverted 'hum signal' coming from the dissimilar coil and therefore they would not cancel. It would reduce the hum, I agree. I know I did not work out the voltage divider in my preceding comment, but in many respects the relatively high impedance of the coils makes them closer to current sources so I need to think about that a bit more.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 27, 2018 13:41:58 GMT -5
The out of phase switching option that Brian May's guitar has would be useless if the pickups were wired in parallel rather than in series. Low output single coil pickups wired in parallel but out of phase would sound extremely thin and weedy. You are right about that! I made a guitar where one of the (many) settings has just that: side-by-side coils out of phase. It *does* sound thin and weedy, but I add that to another pickup and it actually gives me some interesting tones - including a reasonable wah sound if the tone is turned down on the separate pickup and I fade in the thin one. I recall a Brian May interview where he identified all of the settings he has used on various songs, and I think he said that one of them was the 'all-in-series' configuration (possibly what he used in a passage on 'Bohemian Rhapsody')
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 27, 2018 12:59:12 GMT -5
I can certainly attest to 'Strat-itis' as I have experienced it several times even on Humbucker-equipped guitars. Lower pickup height fixed it in all cases for me. If the more-focused field strength of the 3-coil pickup causes this then that would be the first thing I would try in order to correct it.
Also, I saw this configuration in other brands (called the Motherbucker in one case) so it has been done before. I cannot see how it can 'buck the hum' since it cannot be balanced. With the three coils closer together, the 'all-in-series' would be the same as Brian May has as one of his configurations on this guitar except they would be closer together and sound different (not necessarily worse).
I get the same on my Hagstrom Condor if I depress all three pickup switches at once ('all-in-parallel'). It sounds thinner and more crisp - not duller at all. Maybe the series combination would be dull (and might be why Brian May uses an off-board treble booster?).
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 27, 2018 10:53:41 GMT -5
bm2, So, does the new slide get 'stored' with the other slides? Now, now, let's not kick the poor man while he's still down. The courteous thing to do would be to wait until his finger appears to be back to normal, then ask him for a sound sample with the new slide... and see what happens. Apologies - I inadvertently revealed my own bias against slide guitar (mostly because my guitars have low action and slide playing never works well on them so I rarely explore it). I also own several slides, but I only know the whereabouts of one of them and I never use it.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 26, 2018 15:02:53 GMT -5
Good news, met with vicarious relief.
So, does the new slide get 'stored' with the other slides?
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 26, 2018 9:23:10 GMT -5
I purchased a Washburn Mercury II guitar a year ago (from the son of a collector who had died, and he was selling off his Dad's guitars since he did not play - foreshadowing my own future, but that is not why I am writing this thread).
It was in extremely good shape - except for fret wear - and from what I saw the quality of the build and finish was excellent and the neck construction was cleaner than some Les Pauls out there. The man had evidently played it a lot and had also taken very good care of it.
So I went online to see what it was worth and noted that these are not at all highly valued (but I did not overpay, whew!). It made me wonder how a guitar so nicely built, with well-designed and unique hardware, made with pride by a company who has been around for so many years, has not developed a more sterling reputation.
Now, soundwise, this guitar has some nice settings but the pups are quite dull for my taste. I have guitars with humbuckers that are much more 'alive' than that, but the split coil tone and switching both pups on does give a very pleasant tone and the output can drive my Marshall nicely. Still, I might look into new pups for it down the road. Not a rush on that (I have 15 guitars to choose from at home). I avoided playing it until the past weekend when I set up my fret dress jig and did a quick fret job on it. Now it plays very well, low action and no buzzing. It now definitely rivals any guitar I have ever played for action and playability.
It reminds me of the poorer reputations that Teisco del Ray, Samick and El Degas have always had (although Teiscos have seen some renewed interest, probably because they made their own designs whereas El Degas and others seem to always make copies).
Does anyone else out there believe that there are some brands that are still undervalued and under-recognized?
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 19, 2018 9:56:59 GMT -5
OMG - just thinking of that injury hurts!
I would soak in warm salty water and use something like Polysporin in the short term. Maybe it would heal faster after medical intervention, otherwise it would probably work its way out if infection can be avoided but that might be a long time.
Dunno - I never attended medical school.
If you play keyboard I think you referred to it as the 4th finger since they count the thumb (but for guitar/violin I understood it is the 3rd).
I hope it clears up, and ceases to be painful, in the shortest timeframe possible
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 18, 2018 9:38:18 GMT -5
When I had my two electrics lying on the bed after playing one plugged in, I would put it down, still plugged in, touch the strings on the other one (not plugged in) and hear a click through the amp. They were probably four feet apart. Even afterward, standing in one spot, I could touch the strings on the plugged one, then the other and it would do it. When an electrostatic discharge occurs it emits RF across a large range of frequencies, and this can be picked up by electronics that acts like an antenna (guitar circuitry, cord, amplifier) and demodulated into audible pulses by any nonlinearity in the circuit/amplifier response. I know from performing this as a test on communications electronics - using a barbecue starter to generate a spark - that it is amazing how hard it is to prevent this from impacting electronics with a communication glitch. I understand from the theory that any aperture, like a small slot in shielding or a gap between a cover and a grounded enclosure, will permit some high frequency to get through and it can be prevented only by forming a complete *unbroken shield*. This is called a Faraday Cage, and for guitars and their gear it is pretty well impossible to achieve this. I think that explains why a spark onto the unplugged guitar can still cause noise through the amp (and similarly touching a doorknob and getting a spark would probably do the same thing).
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Post by blademaster2 on May 24, 2018 13:45:40 GMT -5
Thanks,
I used a StewMac nickel humbucker cover over a Seymour Duncan single coil SSL-1. I cut the sides lower on the cover, and drilled holes for the SSL-1 poles to protrude through them (made a mess of the hole locations, but that is beside the point :-) ).
With that I was able to quickly slip the cover over the SSL-1 and remove it just as easily, and that permitted me to make a reasonably good comparison. I did notice a slight loss in crispness in the tone (very subtle), and I gather that is the loss that your plot shows for "loaded/covered" versus "loaded/uncovered". Very interesting to see, thanks very much. Even with the difference between humbucker and single coil, it at least explains that there is indeed a slight high-frequency loss in the response when a nickel cover is added, however subtle.
My ears were not wrong. :-)
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Post by blademaster2 on May 24, 2018 11:12:22 GMT -5
I am interested in the apparently profound impact that you saw with the cover removal.
I heard the difference myself recently when adding/removing a chrome plated nickel cover from a single coil pup, but I have not until now seen any measurements to show what impact the cover introduces to the pickup response. I think that those plots did not include the loading effect of the cable and amplifier (please correct me if I am wrong).
Are there any results that anyone has to show the frequency response of a loaded pickup (single coil or humbucker, connected via a volume control circuit and loaded by a length of cable and an amplifier), with and without a cover to show what difference the cover makes when all else is equal?
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Post by blademaster2 on May 24, 2018 9:34:06 GMT -5
What a great way to get two effects in one.
If you compared it to a Boss DM-2 with your new LPF added, how does it compare?
One of the things I liked most in the DM-2 was its low noise - virtually disappearing when no signal was coming through - so if this was as good in that respect it is a very useful effect.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 18, 2018 9:00:30 GMT -5
I have an AMPEG V4 (made around 1973), a small Marshall combo, and a VOX AC15.
The most versatile is the AMPEG by far, and although it has a nice 'smokey warmth' it sounds a little too sterile and clinical for me sometimes and that is where the VOX fills the gap with a little more colour. The AMPEG has excellent reverb and also the most variation in tone control of any amp I have seen. It is also ridiculously loud.
I love them both.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 16, 2018 15:35:09 GMT -5
I get a similar 'snap' sound from static discharge when I first touch anything on the guitar that is grounded. In Canada's dry winters I can even hear rapid static discharge 'snaps' as I run my hand up and down the neck without even touching the strings.
Still, grounded or not, your description sounds to me like a static discharge of some kind.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 11, 2018 9:11:51 GMT -5
I remain slightly more optimistic about guitar and R&R in general.
Short term, low ebb for sure (I saw it in 1982 also). However my son and his friends still hold high regard for classic and Prog rock and say that the 70s was the best decade. They hate today's offerings. I cannot honestly believe that Hip Hop, cheap drum machines, videos of bikini-clad twerking women and rappers wearing gold chains in Hollywood mansions will not *someday* get tiresome for more of the industry and public.
Maybe the next wave will be more electronic and techno, maybe acid jazz, maybe something else before guitar comes around again but I believe that the honesty and expressive nature of our beloved instrument will survive even if Gibson does not. After all, music with the message that "Rock is Dead" has been around for decades, and even the Beatles in 1965 felt that their run of success would be brief.
Of all groups of folks out there, at least *we* Nutz need to keep the faith.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 8, 2018 8:20:50 GMT -5
Newey, that is looking great!
It will be a very cool, minimalist guitar when you are done. Can you post some audio of it when it is ready?
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Post by blademaster2 on May 7, 2018 17:12:45 GMT -5
I am doing two things right now:
1) Adding lacquer to a neck that sadly was bumped from its wall hanging hook and received some small but rough dents on the back of the neck once it hit a guitar stand (after it bounced off of my shoulder - don't ask). The wood needed some small pieces added to make it flat and smooth on the spot before adding the lacquer. I am dabbing the lacquer with a cotton swab a little each day - and it has required more than 14 applications to build up the layers thick enough that I can sand it flush later after it has cured. Trying to be patient ....
2) Trying to fit a plastic humbucker pickup cover over a Humbucker-mounting-frame holding a single coil SSL-1 pup and drilling holes for the staggered poles to poke through. I am struggling a lot to get these holes positioned correctly and despite using a precise caliper it has not yet worked (plus, the pup cover does not *quite* fit through the old mounting ring). It has been a challenge, and since it is cosmetic only I am wondering if I will ever repeat this until I get it right or just live with the uncovered pup.
3) Considering modifying my E-bow so that its sensor/actuator is mounted (strapped) on my palm near my right wrist and the 9V battery can be strapped further up my forearm with a pair of wires connecting them. If it can be done and still work, I would like to be able to play the strings normally and then place my palm over the desired string to get the E-bow to kick in whenever I want to. I would also use a rubber material on the underside of the E-bow, in place of the hard plastic that forms its housing, so that it need not make any sound when contacting the strings that are not being bowed.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 2, 2018 16:34:06 GMT -5
I used a 1H inductor in the bridge tone circuits of all of my guitars. It definitely is more interesting sounding to me than capacitor tone circuits.
On my guitars if you use the neck pickup with its tone turned down all the way, and then mix in the bridge pup using the volume control with this gadget in place on the tone circuit (also turned down to low) it makes a pretty decent wah-wah sound.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 27, 2018 15:52:24 GMT -5
.... and the founder of Tronical actually said in the press release that most beginner guitarists give up because they cannot tune their instrument.
Not at all true in my experience with teaching and observing. With their timing in this lawsuit they seem more like vultures now than any boon to guitarists.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 25, 2018 15:37:55 GMT -5
What I have seen is more publicizing of different boutique guitars, plus the vintage market (which really took off in the past 20 years). Combining that with declining quality of Gibsons of late (which, sadly, I saw for myself in a music store) and you have at least part of a perfect storm. It must be frustrating to see your own products become your primary competitor.
If there truly is also a long-term trend for guitars to be less desirable then that also adds to it, although I saw that happen before during the 'electro-pop' years of the early 1980's, and I suspect that these things cycle in pop culture like wide ties and lapels. As a very expressive and (fairly) democratic instrument, I am confident that people will look to guitars again once they get a little bored of the more-than-a-decade love affair with Hip Hop and Rap.
Whether Gibson has the stored fat to survive until another cyclic resurgence makes guitar music fashionable again is another question. Although I have no Gibsons myself, I would be sad to see them disappear. The Fender/Gibson rivalry, like the cola wars, is part of our DNA. I would like to see them return to instruments of more substance and quality, too.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 23, 2018 16:31:05 GMT -5
Okay, improper removal way well be the case, but the splattered mess left by the flux and the poor routing of the fine transducer wires gives me the shivers. Roland's manufacturing service provider would never pass inspection in my industry.
The similarly-fine wire on single-coil pups always looks far better than this.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 23, 2018 8:59:44 GMT -5
I am just jumping into this thread, but I am shocked at the poor quality workmanship of that circuit board.
It looks like someone has messed with it, or that it is a counterfeit product, or both. I have never seen such poor work on a commercial product. I would investigate its authenticity.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 16, 2018 10:49:36 GMT -5
Avoiding the risk of copyright, royalties, et cetera, I would probably suggest some 12-bar blues or a generic rock riff containing power chords with interspersing guitar soloing. Any Hendrix-like riffing would suffice. Alternatively, try just playing chords like you did with a mix of faster chords (shorter time between) played at different levels of attack to show the gradual onset of distortion. That is one area where stomp boxes that I have owned usually fall short: They do well for heavy, fully-distorted playing but sound dull when backing off to a more subtle edge.
What you had already before sounded encouraging to me, so if you gave more like the above to the same circuits (1 and 2 as my preference) it would be great.
Thanks for your work in this experiment!
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 14, 2018 22:29:31 GMT -5
Thanks so much for taking the trouble to provide audio samples of the various circuits. That was a lot of work and I found it very interesting to compare like that.
I might need to hear, say, a riff or something with more frequent attacks on the strings to know for sure, but I found that #1 and #2 were the ones that seemed to preserve the crisp attack on the strings and give that furry edge that (to me) would be good for some bluesy rhythm playing. I was more impressed by the tone than I expected to be. I doubt it can replace a good Fender or Vox amp, and it certainly is not a hard rock tone from what I heard, but I did think it had some merit.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 6, 2018 10:00:25 GMT -5
Retread,
Yes, I know. Diodes back-to-back would be imposing the lowest voltage response to dominate, so what I was trying to mention (perhaps not clearly) was that a *single* zener would do what two other diodes would do as a result of its lower PIV and would be asymmetrical. That would add more harmonics to the mix and might be an interesting tone, or it might be harsh and benefit from some filtering. I have seen these in guitar stomp boxes, too, where they first buffer the signal to become less sensitive to the parasitic effects.
On that note JohnH is, of course, correct to point out the impact of the non-ideal (exponential) response curve of a diode. It will start to have an effect at lower-than-threshold signal levels (in fact the capacitance of some might be significant enough to dull the tone for all amplitudes). That was why I was suggesting a 1N4148, which is a fairly high frequency device and requires a pretty small current to reach its diode-drop voltage - hence likely going to introduce fewer loading and capacitive effects to the signal where they are possibly not desirable. Again, I have never tried this on a passive circuit like a guitar where its source impedance is high and therefore very sensitive to loading capacitance parasitics.
I have seen commercially-available 'passive distortion' devices advertised for internal installation into a (passive) guitar that I assume consists of some sort of diode within it, so there is some evidence that this approach can work to some degree.
It all sounds like good fun to try all of this and I look forward to hearing more about the results.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 5, 2018 15:13:01 GMT -5
Well that is good that the clarification of the documentation was all that was wrong (but bad that the problem was not as simple as I had first thought!).
The zener diode you have seems to need a fair amount of current to reach its nominal breakdown voltage (the zener 'knee'), so the device might start to suck away your signal at lower levels than than that and I cannot say how it will influence tone (heck, it might give a smoother clipping effect). As I wrote earlier, my first thoughts are to start with small signal diodes (like the 1N4148) to clip your pickup signal, which would be switched in your circuit to connect them between the signal and ground. Assuming they need very little current to perform their clamping operation - their data sheet shows as little as 0.1mA to reach the knee at around 0.5volts - then you should start to hear the effect as long as your pups produce more signal amplitude than that. I have no idea how this would sound.
For active circuits that are amplified and can provide more current for the signal, I have seen combinations of zener and regular PN diodes in parallel to produce more of an asymmetrical clipping response and presumably introduce more harmonics into the sound. This is often followed by a filter of some sort to shape the relative strength of the harmonics in the output signal and achieve the 'edge', 'punch', and 'attack' that the player wants to hear. Without this filtering it might sound harsh and thin, so the amplifier setting adjustments might be needed to get the desired sound. I have not tried this on a passive system and I am curious what it will do for you.
I have also heard that the results are good with the use of LEDs for clipping, which have an even higher forward voltage closer to 2 volts and hence almost certainly needs amplification before you would hear the effect. Someone once told me that a 4000-series CMOS logic inverter chip (like a 4049 hex inverter) produces a great, warm distortion tone for guitar - but I have never experimented with these myself. I would want to attenuate the output for the first attempt with this approach so that the levels can be better suited for a guitar amplifier.
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Post by blademaster2 on Apr 5, 2018 8:58:40 GMT -5
Forgive me for not taking a very long time studying this before responding, but it looked to me like you had swapped the signal and ground on the jack and a few other places. If that is true, then your circuit, which is supposed to tie the signal with your diodes shunting them to ground ("clamping is a better description", which essentially clips the amplitude the same way some distortion units do it), is only tying ground to ground and hence does nothing.
You might also be shorting your entire signal to ground from what I saw.
Otherwise, switching in these diodes between the signal and ground as I expect is the intent *should* clamp as you are hoping. The only other problem might be that the pickups need to generate a signal large enough to be clamped (i.e. more than 0.65volts peak for regular diodes like a 1N4148, however Schottky diodes kick in at closer to 0.5volts but might be more leaky and before then could sound poor but I never tried it) before you will hear this effect kick in. If your guitar pups have lower output then this might not be very effective.
Apologies if I did not review the material thoroughly enough, but if I am right then that might explain what is happening.
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Post by blademaster2 on Mar 28, 2018 15:25:53 GMT -5
Antigua- I assume you mean "capacitor", not "resistor". Since this is a step-by-step tutorial for the uninitiated, typos should probably be corrected for clarity. But, yes, great work! I won't move this thread, as it does relate to pickups certainly, but I think you should probably repost this in the "References" section as well. On the topic of capacitors: Antigua, your SPICE circuit seems to be achieving a close result to lab measurements so I would say your model is pretty accurate. I see, however, that the Tone control resistance is tied straight to ground whereas in typical tone control circuits I see (different from my own guitars) it would have a capacitor between the Pot resistance and ground. I gather it makes little difference since you are already so close. In my admittedly-weird guitar circuits I *do* tie the pot to ground, but I have tested it with this ground connection opened up and hear no difference at all.
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