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Post by newey on Apr 20, 2021 5:19:02 GMT -5
We don't rewrite history here by removing or editing threads. You made a mistake; someone else may learn from your experience. So just leave everything as is.
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Post by unreg on Jul 20, 2021 10:43:22 GMT -5
Did this thread break? It was extremely interesting… I’ve never contributed so I feel uncomfortable.
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Post by newey on Jul 20, 2021 20:02:24 GMT -5
Not at all. Along with JFrankParnell's "Major to Minor" thread, this is The One That WOuld Not Die . . .". However, I did advise thetragichero to detail his amp builds in the Amps section, with a separate thread for each one, so that all those gems could be more easily accessed. This thread was getting a bit unwieldy. So Trag has done so, and is now posting more of his amp build stuff in the Amps section, for the reference of others. Your discomfiture is unnecessary. The thread is to post what people are working on at present. If you're not working on anything at the moment, no worries. You may have noticed that I haven't posted any recent projects- all of mine are "on hold" for lack of free time. Heck, I'm lucky to find time to play, apart from my weekly lessons.
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Post by thetragichero on Jul 20, 2021 20:12:09 GMT -5
i have another turret board fuzz pedal i built that still needs some troubleshooting (i bet the second transistor is backwards since it sounded better with em backwards on the breadboard for some reason...). just haven't uploaded a picture to imgur. i've also been spending more time working on the house or riding my bicycle (doctor's orders!) recently, although past two days have been spent recording. i will still be posting updates from time to time, don't you worry!
and feel free to post stuff you're working on. my initial reason for posting is sometimes i can get overwhelmed looking at the big picture of "how am i ever going to turn this pile of parts into a working amp?!" and forget the old adage: how do you eat an elephant? one bite at a time
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Post by frets on Oct 25, 2021 21:47:03 GMT -5
Coming up with a feasible Solderless Telecaster basic upgrade. Finally got a basic to fit nice and tidy; but, I don’t think a Solderless Tele can be done for more advanced mods.
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Post by thetragichero on Nov 2, 2021 15:21:05 GMT -5
what is this? well... tek453 has a 1khz square wave test signal. useful for simple "why sound not come out?" troubleshooting but not more delicate issues so this little box of salvaged parts (four pole rc filter followed by a jfet amplification stage) smooths the waveform into more of a sine shape. passive filter is of course very lossy so a bit of recovery gain gets me to about 60mV (according to my meter) which isn't super strong but probably more useful for testing than a 500mV square wave (bad picture courtesy of my phone) used the enclosure from the first pedal i ever built and the jacks came out of the fender pa135 I'll finish one of these days... would never use these old jacks in a build so a bit of recycling here
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Post by gckelloch on Nov 3, 2021 20:54:40 GMT -5
Hey all, I finally decided to build a Baritone, and do all the finish work myself. I had a Black Limba “Jagcaster” body and a Roasted/flame-Maple neck w/PauFerru FB, Stainless frets, and Jadestone dot inlays made by BYOG. I did have to round the FB edges myself, and it will need some minor fret work if I don’t go all out and have it Plek’d, which I might. I put in and slotted a bone nut -- mainly because they are much cheaper than Graphtec. I got me a 3mm thick piece of Acrylic for the pickguard, under which I will use layers of Aluminum tape for some upper-mid reduction and potential rheostat noise rejection. Here's it is with just the two strings I used with a clamp to align the neck for drilling, which worked a charm: I chose a Limba body because it’s a very consistent wood and I really like the sound of all the Limba body guitar demos I’ve ever heard, particularly Greg Koch’s Reverend “Gristlemaster”. The body was just under 4lbs, and the assembled guitar was only 6.6lbs (with just two strings and no strap buttons). It doesn’t lack bass response, but isn’t as tight and punchy as my 10lb (yikes!) roasted Ash Strat body guitar. I wanted a fat/ hollowish Dan Electro type tone, and my initial recording (of only the low and high B strings I put on) seems to have that quality. I will actually be putting the 1.1mm thick Lexan bracket in the neck pocket I use in bolt-ons to extend the freq response and sustain (via less neck pocket damping). It’s a subtle difference that matters more with lighter-weight/softer-wood bodies. I didn’t use it in the 10lb Strat, but I did chisel out some of the wood in the center of the pocket to increase coupling force and reduce damping. More wood contact there increases damping. That guitar is a beast. I went with a roasted Maple neck for stability and looks. The Pau Ferro FB option wasn’t expensive and I wanted a fairly bright attack to offset the soft sound of the Limba body. It’s a very nice-looking quarter-sawn piece. I got a set of Gotoh staggered 15:1 Vintage tuning pegs that feel rather tight, but are very solid. I don’t think I’ll need any string trees. I chose the thin Wilkinson chopped Tele bridge because I didn’t want the ashtray bridge twang, and I didn’t want a thicker bridge compromising the hollow sound quality, but I had to order extra saddles to intonate correctly for a wound 3rd string. I chose Steel (Ti-coated) for the wound strings for better definition. Brass mellows the high plain strings. I don’t go in for electronics “Mojo”. I just use all 22AWG Silicon insulated wire, and whatever cheap caps and resistors I can find for the job. I wired up a blend (engaged in the middle toggle pos) on a “250k” P/P pot with a cap to crossover the pickups between 2~4kHz when turned down, and as a standard blend when turned up. The switch on it swaps which pickup delivers the low or high freq blend. The other P/P pot is wired as a Volume/Tone in one with a 1n7F cap from the outer lug to ground. It rolls off the tone above ~2kHz for each pickup, and at a bit higher freq when they are combined, but only seems to drop the overall volume by maybe half when at 0. I didn’t want to add an extra Tone knob and I don’t really need a Volume knob, so I tried to combine them in one. I may try something else instead. The switch on it flips the phase of the bridge pickup for different blend tones, including the “octave” sound when the blend is up near ten. I used 160k of R over the + & - leads to reduce the resonance so the pickups are pretty flat up to ~6kHz, and a bit higher when combined, but I will change it to 220k for the final assembly so I can get more ~8kHz shimmer. The peak should only be ~1dB higher at ~6.5kHz rather than 5kHz. I went with a set of Wilde T-style Micro-Coils. There is a common misconception that HB pickups have more bass, but the wider aperture really just increases output, creates a lower range harmonic cancelation, and reduces higher harmonics, while the “soft” alloy core in PAF’s, P90’s, etc increases efficiency and rolls off the high end. Micro-Coils don’t do any of that except the core alloy does increase the inductance and efficiency of the small, dense, 46AWG wire coil. The S/N ratio is very high for a SC pickup and having adjustable pole screws for individual note output/timber is more important to me than 0 hum. I am experimenting with a finish involving tinted Acrylic paint, green dye and an Acrylic clear coat I hope works out. The neck will just get a few coats of Tru-Oil. So there’s my totally joyless/humorless report. Sometimes I really wonder if I am “on the spectrum” or just OCD.
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Post by thetragichero on Mar 26, 2022 12:19:23 GMT -5
finally added a strangle switch to my pawnshop bass vi (three way so 8n2, no cap, traditional 3n3) to allow cleaner 'guitar' passages oh hey, never posted a picture of my work space. much better than sitting and working on a folded out futon
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Post by thetragichero on Apr 1, 2022 21:06:27 GMT -5
i keep forgetting to post these mojo fuzz builds. based off of univox sq-150 square wave fuzz (which is based off of fuzz face) with a clipping switch and other weirdness board laid out and drilled with eyelets inserted board populated (carbon comp and mil spec resistors from a nice online surplus store in Nebraska), enclosure drilled, ready to wire up tomorrow
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Post by thetragichero on Apr 1, 2022 21:36:06 GMT -5
i posted about this one back in July, finally got it working last week (hadn't had the patience to troubleshoot it). yet another non germanium fuzz face with bias control and a switch and knob to allow a TON more bass through (labeled THICCC) for blown out doom metal sounds. one of these days I'll get a small recording setup (recording pc and rack are in storage) to demo everything (certainly would help sales)
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Post by thetragichero on Apr 2, 2022 20:30:46 GMT -5
oh hey it's done it's surprisingly not noisy for how much distortion it creates. it's slightly gated in that when you mute the strings it's silent but not so much that it doesn't sustain (that's one thing i hate about the quick-and-dirty diode noise gate in the boss hm2) i did a quick demo on my phone for instagram but have to wait until i find my dvcam (*somewhere* in storage) or get my hands on a simple interface (there's one waiting for me in jersey but who knows when I'll be able to pick it up)
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Post by reTrEaD on Apr 3, 2022 9:14:24 GMT -5
Those knobs are awesome.
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Post by thetragichero on Apr 8, 2022 9:39:18 GMT -5
here's some demo videos of these mojo pedal builds made with my ancient dvcam. can't handle the bass when kicking in the THICC switch
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Post by frets on Apr 8, 2022 12:30:52 GMT -5
Trag, I love them all! My fav is the first one at the top. I’d love to have that circuit. Heavy heavy grungy and dungy, but great clarity. Your stuff is always so well thought out.
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Post by unreg on Apr 10, 2022 23:16:45 GMT -5
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Post by thetragichero on Apr 17, 2022 9:22:21 GMT -5
this was yesterday but... I'm expecting 2 or 3 wah pedals coming my way so i thought it would be cool to rip out the boards and put something else in. my personal wah started life as a vox v845 (cheapest wah that was available on sweetwater at the time) that i never really liked, even after a ton of mods. so last year when i had a colorsound wah from the 60s for a bit i cloned that circuit with some tweaks to work better for bass. it's got a narrow sweet spot but it travels through it quickly so for folks who aren't a spaz like me (playing and wahing require too much coordination) it can be very expressive and then lots of room for toe up or toe down "cocked wah" tones. so I'm making boards to drop in these new wahs. this is a scrap of g10 that was originally epoxied to the bottom of my 5e3 clone to insulate the turret board. next one will be on non-plated perf for an old school look
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Post by MattB on May 5, 2022 17:41:11 GMT -5
Pot-mounted buffer with quick connect and mini cap selector.
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Post by thetragichero on May 6, 2022 8:58:35 GMT -5
that's neat! if you look into multilayer ceramic caps you can reduce the size considerably
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Post by MattB on May 6, 2022 12:58:18 GMT -5
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm working on a cab sim at the moment and I've been struggling with the layout a bit because I was trying to fit in three of those big grey box caps. I'm going to have way more space now.
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Post by thetragichero on May 6, 2022 16:09:33 GMT -5
since this kind of stuff is small voltage you can get some really small caps with large values... i had some 10uf 25v caps that were about the size of the little ceramic on your board
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Post by thetragichero on May 6, 2022 23:04:59 GMT -5
had some time today (nothing pressing/in between running errands) to remove the strings from my les paul, clean and oil the board, and finally replace the cheapo bridge (it's what i had after i refinished it and just wanted to get the thing together) with a proper gotoh bridge and tailpiece
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Post by thetragichero on May 14, 2022 17:46:52 GMT -5
made an adjustable amp chassis cradle out of various scraps around the shop also went through my dad's 71/72 deluxe reverb replacing all electro caps and making the last few changes to bring it to blackface specs (think that amounted to just changing the coupling capacitor into the phase inverter because the rest of the amp was ab763 spec). removed the death cap and polarity switch, filled the hole with a 25k mid pot for the normal channel to make it less blah. replaced two prong power cord with a three prong cable and made sure both the fuse and power switch were on the line side (tsk tsk lazy fender switching neutral)
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Post by reTrEaD on May 15, 2022 13:15:13 GMT -5
made an adjustable amp chassis cradle out of various scraps around the shop Looks good. Easy to see how the width is adjustable. Is the tilt angle fixed or is that adjustable, too.
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Post by newey on May 15, 2022 13:29:18 GMT -5
Is the tilt angle fixed or is that adjustable, too. Yeah, my first thought was a rotisserie, like guys use with a classic car restoration project.
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Post by thetragichero on May 15, 2022 15:37:52 GMT -5
tilt angle is currently fixed with 6 screws. could certainly be made adjustable (that was the initial goal) but this is pretty much perfect for bench and chair height so i don't imagine I'll need it to. figure for now this is the most secure way
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Post by thetragichero on May 16, 2022 18:36:14 GMT -5
2000s nyc big muff reissue converted to true bypass, replaced dc jack with boss-style, changed to triangle muff tone stack and added a switch to change to a 'flat mids' tone stack, added a three way on-on-on clipping switch to select between stock silicon, LEDs, and middle position that has one stage silicon and the other LEDs. toyed with adding a bunch of other stuff but i prefer to keep it simple
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Post by thetragichero on May 26, 2022 20:09:21 GMT -5
picked up a wurlitzer 4150 organ and tone cabinet (not a leslie because licensing rights would've cost $$$) tuesday. pair of 6l6gc that came out didn't test very well but the nine rca 12ax7a and 5u4gb tested brand new. two utah 12" speakers (dang i was hoping this was one of the ones that came with jensens) sound decent on my 5w amp in the shop. power and output transformers are good. haven't cracked open the tone cabinet yet. trying to see if i can do anything with the 28 12fq8 tubes that were used for the tone generation. even something like a tube octave down would be cool. looks like there's a bunch of OLD books to find pdf versions of
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Post by MattB on May 31, 2022 16:08:27 GMT -5
Well thetragichero was right. Turns out I could make it a lot smaller. This is an upgraded version. I got rid of the cap selector to make more space for everything else but I don't really need it now I know what sounds good with my pickups.
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Post by stevewf on Jun 3, 2022 11:30:34 GMT -5
Well thetragichero was right. Turns out I could make it a lot smaller. Hey MattB, you were right that @tragichero was right , that's very compact. this is kinda an "aside", but what's that pot underneath your handiwork? Is it Bourns's "Vintage Premium Guitar Potentiometer"? www.bourns.com/docs/product-datasheets/82.pdf? Anyone tried 'em? And further, Bourns makes some pretty fancy pots that visually resemble that, eg PTJ90 Series Dual Concentric Shaft Panel Control w/Push-Push Switch and several others, including multi-gang, rotary and p/p switches, that are not in their "ProAudio" marketing section. What are thoughts on the durability, fidelity and wirability of those?
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Post by thetragichero on Jun 3, 2022 12:16:20 GMT -5
looks like one of those small alpha pots
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