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Post by blademaster2 on Mar 16, 2018 8:44:55 GMT -5
Sad news indeed. "Walk, Don't Run" was also my intro to surf music, but it was The Venture's version of "Pipeline" that hooked me forever. For the benefit of our younger members, he's talking about a vinyl recording. It's a flat, black and circular thing with a hole in the middle. Unlike an mp3 file, they degraded a little with every playing. Have you noticed that coloured (Canadian spelling) vinyl is returning now? That was a desperate attempt in the late 70's to give vinyl a boost because it was starting to lose out to cassette tape. By 1988 vinyl was so uncool people would literally toss them to the curb by the boxload along with their Denon turntables. I am glad I never did that, although I was quite fed up with the poor quality of those later pressings and did go to CD myself back then. Now I support vinyl, CD, and MP3 formats - my favourite medium for convenience and sound quality is vinyl source material recorded to CD.
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Post by blademaster2 on Mar 2, 2018 9:44:43 GMT -5
If you are heading towards a single rotary switch design, most probably a 4 pole 6 position, then there are certain arrangements that fall easily into place and some that don't. The most obvious and very useful selection is to say that pickups are only combined in parallel, and each pickup is either full humbucker or single coil. Electrically, two poles do the pickup selection and two do coil cutting. eg, you can have N, N+B, B where N and B are either full humbucker or single. You could have 6 positions where the first three are 'Les Paul' and the second three are 'Tele'. Order is a free choice and if you want bridge Hb plus Neck single, you can sub that for another that you don't need. What's not easily done (I'm not going to say cant be done when reTrEaD and Yogi are watching!), is to mix up selections as above with those involving two pickups in series or phased, or coils of one pickup in parallel. We tend to run out of switch poles to achieve this. You might be interested in one wrinkle that would work in this system though, which is to part-bypass one coil with either a cap or a resistor. This can make a split bridge humbucker maintain an edgy single-coil tone but without thinning out too much. I use it on my builds. I used a 3-pole, 6-position switch years ago to achieve the following combinations with two coils: Series Parallel Out of Phase (plinky tone, only useful to add to a third pickup coil) Single coil 1 Single coil 2 Single coil 2 reverse phase I have found all of them to be useful, especially when combined with another pickup (i.e. a third single coil or a humbucker). I posted this wiring in another thread in 2017.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 21, 2018 22:11:20 GMT -5
Here are some photos: old switch, example of enlarged channel, and the new switches after installation. Sadly, my awesome soldering was not photographed.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 21, 2018 16:08:13 GMT -5
These old switches were open-frame things (like the new ones, but different design) used for pickup selection (and also neck selection in this case).
I think their weakness was the very tiny contact point, where somehow the contact degraded. Also, due to the shorter length of the flexible contacts that are displaced by the toggle moving back and forth the old ones were harder to switch and not as smooth operating. I very much like the look and feel of the new ones.
The amount of wood removal was very small (probably less than 0.5 cu inch), and only where the wiring channel, which was shallower than the switch cavities, was not deep enough to accommodate the added dimension of the right-angle switch. I removed just enough wood on these channels to clear the room for the switch contacts and wiring, but not even as deep as the original switch cavity depth. I never did measure the depth of the switch cavity versus straight switches but I suspect it would have been too shallow since the body is thinner than a Les Paul - and the *last* thing I wanted to do was to risk busting through the back of the body with a forstner bit.
I will get photos posted a little later, but I hope Sumgai is not expecting to see much in them except very small amount of cavity wood removed and sealed. I did not photograph my soldering (but I did beautiful solder joints - good enough to pass J-STD-001FS inspection). The biggest visible difference is the appearance from the outside, as the new ones look much less clunky.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 21, 2018 11:14:46 GMT -5
This was a relatively small job: I was frustrated with the noisy/scratchy switches on my Epiphone doubleneck - they were the miniature ones with tiny point-contacts and not the large ones I have seen on Gibsons. I have cleaned them a few times but they would soon return to becoming flakey in a relatively short time. Last month I purchased a set of right-angle Gibson-style switches from StewMac (expecting the straight ones to be too high for the shallower doubleneck body cavity) and planned to replace them.
It required a small amount of wood removal to enlarge the cavity where the footprint of the larger switches needed to go, so I cut some neat swathes into the wood, sealed the exposed areas (probably not necessary as this is inexpensive mahogany plywood), and carefully soldered in the new switches. The job was quite clean when it was done and it went back together with no mishaps.
I am very pleased with the look of these new switches (sitting lower on the pickguard and cleaner, more minimal collar on them) and their smoothness of operation, and the guitar operates as it should. I love the sympathetic vibrations of the unplayed neck when the other neck is in use. If I have both necks on but turn down the volume on the neck that I am playing and crank the amplifier I get swelling/swirling tones accompanying my playing. Very cool.
I have read some posts that the pickups in these guitars were not good, but I have no complaints about them so I am not in a hurry to buy anything as an upgrade.
Does anyone else in Nuts2 have similar experiences with those cheaper switches?
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 16, 2018 9:44:41 GMT -5
That would be sad. I know they have been less than perfect in their business decisions, and probably hate having to compete with their own products that they sold decades ago, but what would music history have been had their not been the Les Paul guitar and a host of other icons coming from them?
Having said that, just last year I looked at some new Gibson electric guitars in a store (Flying V, Explorer, Les Paul) and saw that the workmanship on all of them especially in the finish was noticeably poor (not buffed flat in some areas, having that "orange peel" appearance, oddly placed masking that looked like they simply did not take the time or care about it). These were not cheap. By comparison, their lower brand Epiphone guitars on the same wall were far better in their finish and workmanship details overall. Had I been planning on buying anything that day it certainly could not have been one of the Gibson high-end instruments.
I do hope that interest in guitar music will rebound, perhaps as people become a little bored with the studio music offerings and "millennial yelps" and tired rapping I hear in new music these days, and I hope that Gibson remains part of the scene - and cleans up their act.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 11, 2018 14:21:53 GMT -5
Antigua,
As a (fellow?) electrical engineer I appreciate your efforts and solid approach to obtaining good, controlled results, especially in comparing the electrical characteristics of various pickups. These are really good, to me, as a basis for understanding any differences that I hear and appreciate when I try different pickups and circuits.
I do have a question, however, based on my recent "testing" to hear the (very, very slight) difference that a metal cover made in the tone of my neck-position SSL-1. I am convinced that I hear a difference with/without the cover in place, and that it is nonetheless very subtle - a slight loss of high frequency response. This cover, from StewMac, is not attracted to the pickup magnets and therefore I accept that this difference is due to eddy currents (perhaps also its capacitance to the coil wire, although the cover was not grounded in my tests as I needed to be able to slip it in and out of place so any effect from the capacitance would be distributed to and from the coils to complete any "bleed path").
If I understand your testing technique, you excite the pickup using a coil (with no core magnets, I gather) placed over the pickup under test and feeding your sweeped sinewave excitation signal into it so you can measure the output frequency amplitude generated by the pickup under test - with and without cable loading.
If the electrically-conductive metal of the cover influences the response, won't you alter the pickup response in your test set up due to the presence of the excitation coil, having so much more metal than the cover has? That would introduce an experimental error into all of your results, albeit equally for all of the pups you test and therefore not invalidate the results for comparative purposes.
If this is making any difference, then the optimum test configuration would really be a piece of stainless steel (same as a guitar string) placed over the pickup and caused to move in a motion that is a sinusoidal sweep through the frequencies of interest (by a motion control system mechanical coupling that is neither magnetically permeable nor electrically conductive), causing the pickup to respond exactly as it would with a vibrating guitar string near it.
I would be very interested to hear if that, or something equivalent, has ever been attempted.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 4, 2018 16:48:59 GMT -5
Just to complete part of my recent experiment, I just performed an A/B comparison with my recently-installed Seymour Duncan SSL-1 in the neck position with and without a metal cover. I wanted to see if I could hear any difference myself between having no metal cover (actually, no cover at all) versus installing a StewMac metal cover. I have read various posts indicating why there is a difference in inductance due to eddy currents in the non-ferrous metal, and that high frequencies are lost due to this, and if this difference is audible or not. The cover is not magnetically attracted to the magnets, but it is electrically conductive of course.
I do accept the presence of eddy currents as a theoretical phenomenon (studied this in university), but it has not been an easy model for me to create intuitively in my mind that this would reduce inductance and/or influence the high frequency response of the pickup audibly.
To be as controlled as I could, I took the cover and sliced it along the sides to make it shorter (around 1/3 height), drilled hopes in it for the SSL-1 pole pieces to fit through (it came with no holes), and I was then able to keep the strings tuned, slip the cover in place within a minute or so, and compare the difference where the strings, amplifier, and my own hearing would be a close to identical for the with-without comparison. I am willing to concede that the shorter walls might be a partial factor, but only to lessen the difference if I was to hear any difference at all.
My observation is that there *is* indeed a very subtle loss of the crisp highs that I could hear before installing it and after removing it. With this cover it lost a little of its 'presence' - still sounds great to me, however (but still bears no resemblance to a Stratocaster). This might be a huge 'duh' to others, but to me it is an interesting result as I always rely on what I can hear before I will accept any broad claims or even instrumented lab results.
So this is unfortunate, since the look of this guitar will need to change when I proceed to acquire a plastic cover, probably in black (I cannot leave it uncovered because it has a humbucker-sized hand-routed hole and a humbucker mounting ring holding this Strat pup and I am not liking that look).
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 2, 2018 12:17:57 GMT -5
Hi Lauryn,
I did not see any follow-up from your original post so I am curious.
Did you end up finding that part for your boyfriend's guitar (ferrules, it was suggested)? If not there are at least a few places we can probably suggest looking.
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Post by blademaster2 on Feb 1, 2018 9:30:30 GMT -5
Hey Newey,
Thanks.
I saw that old thread after I posted, but I still am interested in user's advice on techniques using this gadget.
It is sensitive (as one would expect) to the distance of the string, and that includes bending. That makes it harder to not pull the string away from the active region when bending (and I bend and do vibrato all of the time). I find, contrary to the instructions, that holding back toward the bridge give less movement from bends while still permitting the sense/excitation loop to operate.
It is also sometimes difficult to get a note going, even with a good hammer-on to start it up, but then it 'kicks in' and goes wild and gives such a movement that the pup actually starts to distort (this sounds very unique, as it is something I cannot do using a pick). It certainly makes a good 'Hendrix-like' howl.
I have heard people say you can wave it across the strings and get an arpeggio effect, but I have not been able to get it to respond that readily (yet).
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 31, 2018 9:52:12 GMT -5
Not sure if this is an 'effect' for a different forum, but really it is not IMHP so I am writing this here in the coffee shop.
I have for years been tempted to acquire an E-bow, and finally did. These have been advertised since at least the mid-seventies, and I tried one briefly in the eighties but they were far less affordable then (and I had far less disposable income, too).
I have heard of a few bands that have used them, but they appear to not be prevalent. That surprises me a little since everyone wants more sustain and these things make it infinite.
These gadgets are tricky to use, but to get the howling feedback of a note, or to create a smooth legato passage at a low volume this is a pretty impressive device. It also works fairly well on an acoustic guitar. It does take some practice to get a note going. I am not yet proficient in changing the excited string to another one without causing unwanted sounds of the plastic body touching the other strings.
Are there any folks out there who have any tips on the use of these?
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HNOGD
Jan 23, 2018 16:22:15 GMT -5
Post by blademaster2 on Jan 23, 2018 16:22:15 GMT -5
Your new paint job looks very professional indeed.
What did you use, and how did you apply it?
Did it involve a lot of surfacing done by hand?
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 22, 2018 23:34:59 GMT -5
Well, I was playing Chilliwack just last week. Brian "Too Loud" McCleod was amazing (also played with Headpins) - no embarrassment there.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 22, 2018 23:05:38 GMT -5
I hear you on that.
What I am struggling to grasp is now more at the top level. The presence is eddy currents must mean resistive losses in the material in which they flow. The energy comes solely from the mechanical vibration of the string so the effect of eddy currents, however they are modeled, must take this energy from the vibrating string and reduce its vibrational energy through reduced sustain and/or reduced harmonic content.
That would then be just as audible with or without an amplifier, and it would have little or no direct impact on the signal in the pickup coil (unless the eddy currents somehow influence the inductance or capacitance of the pickup coil, which determine the resonant peak, but I am at a loss to see how that is happening*). If the signal in the coil suffers additional reduction in high frequencies from any other magnetic or parasitic effect I am not seeing that.
*if this was due to the effective secondary of a transformer formed by the magnetic coupling to the cover (non-ferrous, so it is different from a transformer core) then I could see how it *would* reduce the effective inductance of the coil - but I expect that this difference would mean that the pickup LCR readings would be different with and without a cover.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 22, 2018 17:20:33 GMT -5
I am not embarrassed to say that I enjoy pop music from the 70's and 80's, and even the 90's.
Sometimes the lyrics were just a little to "syroppy" (sp?), but would would still resonate. Even seriously uncool bands like The Osmonds, Monkees, even Partridge Family and Bay City Rollers had great moments. Many US pop music was played by The Wrecking Crew, who were top-notch studio musicians, and the songs of, say, Boyce and Hart were well-crafted.
I still get into the Osmonds' "Hold Her Tight" as a pretty good rock song (very Zeppelin-esque) with great vocals. David Cassidy was a really good singer. I will always love the music of LA's Ambrosia ("How Much I Feel" was a huge hit that has beautiful chords and melody and the vocals of David Pack and Joe Puerta together were incredible).
Into the 80's the pickin's were a little slimmer for me, but Gene Loves Jezebel had pretty heavy guitar lines and vocals to match. Yaz was as "non-guitar" as it got but I liked them, too.
Even into the 90's we had the very-listenable two albums by Jellyfish, a very skilled power pop band. Then there is PJ Harvey, who is very fresh and heavy and is still around.
I do draw my own limits, however, with bands like Air Supply. Yeah ....... nuff said on that.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 22, 2018 17:05:29 GMT -5
I get that the resonance is an impedance peak and sensitive to parasitics, but what I am not getting is how an entirely separate circuit - formed by the eddy currents flowing within the metal of a pickup cover - is able to change this or bleed off any electrical energy from this circuit, or influence its peak response. The capacitance of the pickup coil to ground might change and increase if the cover is grounded and I can see that happening, but that would be a parasitic capacitance effect rather than eddy currents. The displacement currents and changing electric field within this cover from eddy currents would be minuscule. I *can* see that it might physically impede string motion as this tiny energy loss warms up the cover metal, but again only very, very slightly. Since it would therefore be mechanical force I would expect to hear it acoustically the same way it would be apparent in the amplified signal.
I am afraid that I am still not getting on an intuitive level that eddy currents cause loss of high frequencies. Perhaps I never will get it, but I do not claim that it does not happen.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 21, 2018 22:28:27 GMT -5
Hello antigua,
I must confess that while I know something of eddy currents I am struggle to really understand just how they are able to impact the frequency response of the guitar signal. This is not to say I am skeptical, just not fully grasping this.
In theory, the changing magnetic field from mechanical string vibration passing through a conductive (non-ferrous) pickup cover would induce eddy currents in that material which would have a tendency to resist the changing field and therefore resist string motion. Those currents themselves will have resonances that will influence their frequencies and (if the energy source is truly only the mechanical string vibration) tend to pull against the string movement slightly at those frequencies. If that is happening, then I imagine that the high frequency losses must be audible in the un-amplified sound as well as in the amplified sound. That seems pretty tiny (no ferrous core in a pickup cover means a low relative permeability for the flux from those currents).
Also, I still am not grasping how that phenomenon in the cover would influence the frequency response of the induced signal in the multiple turns of wire in the pickup. I can see how any current drawn from it, by the amp but mostly the capacitance of the cable, would not only attenuate the high frequencies of the signal but also exert more drag on the string itself at those frequencies (however, plugging in my guitar to its capacitive cable and 'loading' this signal has never given me any impression that this loading has created an added drag force on the vibrating string).
On top of all of that, I also imagine (but with no experimental or analytical numbers to support me on this) that these effects are not only small but also sitting at pretty high frequencies that might be above human hearing.
As small as I believe that they are, I am quite prepared to recognize the influence of eddy currents and their frequency response changes on tone when I try my new chrome cover on the new pickup I recently installed (a SSL-1 in a humbucker mounting ring) on my homemade guitar. If I do detect a loss of highs, I plan to replace that cover with a plastic one and will consider myself to have learned something first hand.
Is there a simple model or explanation to help me intuitively understand this better?
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 5, 2018 9:53:56 GMT -5
PJ,
I did consider that, and I have yet to add a cover to this new one (awaiting delivery from StewMac). I have read posts saying that the eddy current effect is small or inaudible, but I am quite prepared to acknowledge the impact of eddy currents if I experience it with this.
As a result of this uncertainty I will not pot the chrome cover for this new one when I try it, and if I detect that same loss of tone then I will instead purchase a plastic cover. It may well be the case here, since the original pup does not appear to be ceramic (poles *look* the same as alnico pups, but besides that the potting prevents me from saying anything else about them) and they measure similar dc resistance compared to the SSL-1.
This was my third guitar, and I still love playing it. It has very unique electronics for the bridge pup and the mixing circuitry, but I can still play only the neck pup straight through if I want to and that permitted this experiment. I have built two prior to that, all different and experimental in some way or another.
My first guitar taught me that the finish can indeed make a huge change on the tone - and I learned this the hard way. It initially had a thin, polyurethane finish that did not look professional and glossy but the guitar would resonate and regenerate feedback notes like no other solidbody I have tried since. Ignorant of the sound being influenced in any way by the wood or body, I had a friend refinish it with a thick coat of lacquer. Immediately I could sense that it was not as resonant, and in a concert where feedback was needed for one song it was totally non-responsive. I still like the guitar, but I regret what it could have been had I not done that to it.
I still want to build more guitars, but life/wife/kids, you know ......
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 4, 2018 12:51:08 GMT -5
Well, the downturn in guitar interest has now impacted me directly: I was just informed that 'Guitar Aficionado', a magazine I have enjoyed and to which I recently subscribed, is ceasing publication after February.
Admittedly it was geared to lifestyle as much as it was guitars (cars, watches, cigars, liquor, et cetera) but in my demographic it suited me well - I am not an aspiring musician nor do I expect to design, build or sell guitar-oriented products for a living, but my love for guitars as things of beauty and instruments for expression was well represented by this publication.
I now feel like I have fewer like-minded friends out there than I thought.
Thank goodness for Guitar Nutz2, and may we all continue to share our guitar enthusiasm for some time to come ......
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 1, 2018 11:36:41 GMT -5
As I flipped channels between the different New Years Eve celebrations going on in North America I was noticing that most guitar players in the various bands performing in New Year's Eve 2018 events played Fender Jazzmasters.
By far I saw more of these than any other guitar. There were a few Telecasters, one non-Gibson flying V, and a few Stratocasters here and there, but not in great numbers. I saw no Gibson electric guitars at all.
Did this appear noteworthy to anyone else?
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Post by blademaster2 on Jan 1, 2018 11:26:36 GMT -5
I echo those thoughts Newey and I, too, hope we see fewer losses this year especially in the music world.
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 30, 2017 10:33:29 GMT -5
Thanks for your interest.
Yes, I know that the *exact* same pup was not compared across the two bodies (that is a lot more work than I am prepared to undertake for this experiment). I am making the assumption that, both being Alnico and highly regarded as good vintage-sounding Strat replacement pups, they would both at least sound 'stratty' if they were installed into a Strat. My experiment is admittedly a little less conclusive.
The fact that the pup sounds lovely but not 'stratty' in the walnut guitar gives me a pretty good idea that the body/mount is making the chief difference. JohnH posted an excellent comparison of ceramic versus alnico pups and showed that two different alnico ones were fairly close in frequency response, but there are audible subtleties that cannot be measured and I am willing to acknowledge the weakness in my experimental approach.
Either way, I am loving new new pup in my old axe.
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 27, 2017 14:59:08 GMT -5
My experience today might interest a few of you. I have an old guitar that I built myself more than 30 years ago using solid walnut (photos in the gallery, my third one) and back then I installed three Fender-style Strat-type pups in it when I built it. These pups are mounted in HB mounting rings and it looks like a HH guitar.
The bridge up is complex (basically using two single coils as a split coil humbucker) so it is hard to compare anything there and I am leaving it alone for now, but the neck pickup is just a Strat type under a chrome HB cover.
I have always felt that the neck pup was a little dull and lifeless, but when I built the guitar I was a student and had little cash, so I used a second-hand Fender pickup (from a cheap Fender solidbody, not a Strat). It never sounded like a Strat, but many people told me it was because of the low-quality pup. Recently I purchased a Seymour Duncan SSL-1 pickup (Alnico 5, built to sound as much as possible like a vintage Fender Strat pickup) and I swapped it in for the neck position today. Note that the SSL-1 pickups are *supposed* to sound like vintage Strat pups and are rated highly by many.
I love the tone I am getting now when playing on the neck pickup alone, bright and 'glassy', and it sounds punchy and full of life through my VOX amp. I am very pleased.
However .... it also sounds warm and 'woody', with a distinct voice of its own. This lovely tone bears little resemblance to the sharper, more plastic attack of the tone I get from my Strat's neck pup through the same amp (which also has Alnico 5 pickups). The chief differences here are the body material and the plastic pickguard of the Strat versus the pickup ring-mount in my own walnut wood guitar. The only other differences besides the body and mounting would be the location of the neck pup, since my own guitar has 24 frets and therefore the neck position is around 5/8 inch further toward the bridge than on a 21-fret Strat, however that difference would make it *less* warm and more 'twangy' - not warmer - so I do not attribute anything of today's observations to that difference.
I regard today's experiment as an interesting comparison that somewhat reveals/confirms that the body and wood do play a role in a solidbody guitar's tone, in conjunction with the pickups and amplifier of course. I am not a 'tonewood' fanatic and I am not trying to spark another debate, but I also would *never* believe the claims of those who use 'science' of looking at an oscilloscope trace and expecting to detect or refute the nuances of guitar tone that I know I can hear.
To me, I am even more convinced now that pickups alone do not determine tone, and I love the complexities of our instruments that makes them all unique (and why I tell my wife that I need more guitars since they are all different).
Happy New Year!!
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Post by blademaster2 on Dec 19, 2017 13:58:24 GMT -5
When building my third guitar many years ago I found a 6-position, 4-pole rotary switch and I removed one of the poles to give me a 3-pole switch (this also made it shorter so it would fit into the guitar cavity). This was used to select the configuration of the bridge pickup - which was implemented using two back-to-back single coil pups, but could also be a coil-tapped humbucker. All but one of the rotary settings (#3) has been useful on its own as if it were a single pickup, and the output is then combined with the neck pickup, which is also a single coil pup, to make all six of them useful.
Rotary Switch Position Description for Bridge pickup : 1 Series In Phase 2 Parallel / In Phase
3 Parallel / Out of Phase
4 Single coil #2
5 Single coil #1
6 Reverse phase single coil #1
With this combined with and the neck pup I get at least 12 different sounds. I still love the variety and I do not mind the rotary operation at all.
J-1 Electric Guitar rotary switch design and connections to pickup coils, designed by R. Gillett in 1984. Both pickups were installed back to back within a single pickup cover (note that magnetic pole reversal and corresponding polarity assignment for humbucking operation is essential to achieve low noise in series mode).
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Post by blademaster2 on Aug 16, 2017 16:36:54 GMT -5
That items looks *very* much like the ferrite shells that are used to wind custom inductors, so I would conclude that this is a ferrite-core inductor.
In my own guitars I have 1000mH inductors in the tone circuit, and I was inspired to do this by the 800mH air-core inductor that I discovered in the tone circuit of my Framus Nashville deluxe. In your guitar it appears to be a switchable feature and not part of the tone control.
PSPICE modeling showed that the second-order shunt formed by an inductor and capacitor can preserve more of the high frequencies of the attack while attenuating (scooping) the high-mids. Essentially the tone inductor forms a divider with the inductance of the pickup coil and limits the high frequency attenuation above a certain frequency range.
This makes the guitar sound subdued and thinner without entirely losing the clarity of the attack that I experience with other capacitor-based tone controls, and I like this on my guitars where I use it on the bridge pup. I have always called it 'fatness control'.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 19, 2017 14:22:45 GMT -5
Like b4njo, I went through this already in the early 1980's when all of my 'cool' friends would poke fun at me for playing guitar. Guitar was very uncool - synthesizers and drum machines ruled. Even when guitar *was* used the sounds needed to be more electronic and less organic (same happened to drums sounds, where the closer a mix was to a drum machine sound the better, i.e. Sound Garden's 'Badmotorfinger' around 1990). In fact, this slump now is far less noticeable to me than the early 1980's, but evidently more of a problem to the guitar manufacturers' bottom line.
Like lapels and neckties (and reverb on studio recording mixes), I believe that this will turn around again... and again .. and again.
And heck, if I am wrong then maybe I can look forward to snapping up some vintage guitars for a lot less than they have been fetching recently .....
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 1, 2017 13:23:17 GMT -5
Of course hardness (the Janka Hardness rating for wood) is key here and of primary importance.
Additionally, so are other factors such as grain open-ness (not sure what word to use for that), oil content for glue adhesion, grain homogeneity and isotropicity, hygroscopicity and expansion uniformity (very important to maintain level frets), texture for fingertips, tendency to chip and split (different from hardness), and aesthetics. Cocobolo might also be a good candidate functionally, albeit harder to glue due to the oils and I have no idea about its scarcity. I like both ebony and rosewood, slightly more than finished maple, but I look forward to trying the alternatives some day.
Tonewise I can easily imagine subtle differences between woods, but whether or not I or others would hear a noticeable tonal difference between the various hardwoods will be a subject of much debate. I am sure that debate will go on forever as guitarists eventually pine over the long-lost tone of rosewood.
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Post by blademaster2 on Jun 1, 2017 10:42:41 GMT -5
I had also heard that the rosewood restrictions are being extended to all rosewood and not just Brazilian. That sounds like the real reason. The fingerboard does need certain mechanical properties that are beyond just its resonance, so selecting a suitable alternative is tricky. Rosewood has been one of the few woods used for fingerboards consistently for many decades. Given that the fingerboard is half of the sustain, but only half (ignoring acoustic feedback from amplification), it will take some adjustments in the industry to react to this in a widely-accepted manner.
It makes me think again of Brian May's guitar where he used oak for the fingerboard and painted it black. I have not heard of any other guitars that used oak, but it is crisp and hard enough (and has Brian's track record) to be another contender. It would possibly need filler for the very open portions of the grain.
Meanwhile, I will have a look at the hardness and other mechanical properties of this new material myself to see what it is all about.....
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Post by blademaster2 on May 29, 2017 8:56:42 GMT -5
Newey is right about the difficulties of finding intermittent problems and that it is very unlikely that a pickup is itself intermittent. Since it is intermittent, I doubt that a meter will be able to tell you what you cannot already hear.
The first things I would try are the following:
1) In the cavities, look closely at the solder connections and the wiring in general for good 'wetting' of the solder forming a smooth fillet, preferably with a magnifying glass, and if you can do this try gently jiggling on wires while a string is vibrating to see if a poor connection exists. 2) Also while looking at the wiring, see if there is anything like a bare ground wire that could contact a signal wire, or a signal wire that is very close to and could come into contact with something grounded like the body of a potentiometer. Bend the wires away or add electrical tape to insulate that location if you see anything suspicious 3) Spray some contact cleaner (not WD-40) into all pots and switches (if they are open-bodied and contacts can receive this spray) and operate the switches and move the pot controls back and forth while doing this on each one.
Those steps should cover most of the typical sources of trouble like you have described.
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Post by blademaster2 on May 23, 2017 20:12:19 GMT -5
Okay, Sumgai, I will take that to mean "I am interested in seeing that schematic". It is attached as a GIF (I do not do this often, so I hope it is readable). Each pickup shown is a single coil. At least one is a DiMarzio FS-1, another is a DiMarzio PBS I think, but I have forgotten what the third one is. I see that none of them is available any longer from DiMarzio as this was quite a long time ago. I have used this guitar for many years and I still find new tones in it to this day. There are probably weird/unusual things in the design (done mostly in my highschool years, using SPICE and with no other existing guitar designs on which to base it).
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