Own Your Tone Guitar Kit Question

[Inventor]

OK, the latest update on the Own Your Tone kit that Dr. Justice and I have developed is that we've been given advice to eliminate the transformer. This leaves us with two options: 1. a simple setup with no signal boost on-board the buitar, and 2. a FET amplifier in the guitar.

My question to you is would a non-boost setup be acceptable? With this arrangement, the very low signal gets sent into a distortion or gain pedal to do the boosting. If this option were acceptable then we could get to selling the kits right away without any further development.

In option 1. when I put the amp on distortion setting the sound comes out clean if a bit noisy. It's clean because the input signal is so low that it never saturates the distortion circuitry.

In option 2. I have to design a FET board and figure out how to put a battery in the guitar and all that stuff, which will delay the availability of the kit quite a lot.

So what option would you like to see?

Les

[miketheman]

I´m not saying what option I´d like to see here, but I´ll add my 2 cents:

If you´re going to design a FET preamp, there´s no possibility in the world for YOU to figure out where to place the battery within a guitar.
Since all guitars can be very different in their inners in what configuration with pots, switches and whatever they have installed. No need to waste time on that IMHO...

So most manufacturers do it like this I guess: they provide a battery clip with long leads and a batteryholder. Perhaps also an recommendation of what to think of when trying to place that thing (regarding interference, hum/noise problems whatever). In the end its always up to the end-user to figure out where the heck it will fit...

So... what are we actually talking about!?



/Mike

[Inventor]

Hi mike, sorry I should have explained what the kit is. If you look at old strings and things posts, you will find a few posts on this subject. Basically it is a kit that adds a new type of pickup to your guitar. It works by putting magnets under the strings which creates a tiny electrical current in the strings, which then travels down a wire on the neck to a switch and then out the jack.

The concept still works on Faraday's law, but in a different way. Since there are no coils, there is no low-pass filter to limit the harmonics so you get full, rich tone - which is why we call it the Own Your Tone guitar kit. You can read about it on my web page.

Hope that answers your question.

Les

[BobTheDog]

Hi Les,

Option 1 sounds like a no no to me.

Option 2 is more difficult.

For "active" guitars that already have a 9V battery in them you would be fine, most people probably are not willing to route out a hole for a battery in their guitars.

Andy

[Inventor]

Oops, Andy, we're going with option 1. Why do you feel it is a no no?

Les

[BobTheDog]

Well most pickups output around the same amount of juice (don't know the technicalities!) so Amps/FX units etc expect this level. Changing the volume on the guitar as you play then affects how these units respond.

If your pickups are putting out less juice then units don't respond how you think they should, you already mention one effect of this by the fact that your amp on high gain setting is not saturating.

Also what do you mean by clean but a bit noisy?

Cheers

Andy

[Inventor]

By clean but a bit noisy I meant that the distortion pedal does not actually produce distortion but rather a "clean" guitar sound. But there is some background noise. In other words, you put the amp on distortion and you get an undistorted guitar sound out of it, but it you krank it up loud you hear some hiss (noise).

Les

[Oskar]

Les, I know sweet FA about electronics, so I'll concentrate on theapplication of the proposed gadget.
It's like Andy says, guitar amps and effects pedals and whatnot are nearly all of them optimised for pickups within a certain range, so I would recommend getting your device's output in the ballpark, output-wise. There are great variations as to how "hot" we plank spankers want our pickups, and I don't have the knowledge to help you in that department. Also, the preferences regarding frequency response varies drastically between players.
It's a bit like that Paul Simon song, "One man's ceiling is another man's floor."
To me, this sounds like the type of pickup I might consider using in tandem comjunction with, rather in place of, "conventional" pickups, as there might be interesting options to be had from sending the different types of p-u to different signal chains, so mebbe your "full bandwidth" model being run very, very clean, either to feed an extra fx chain (I'm thinking mebbe delays, chorus, reverbs and that) or purely to accentuate the pick attacks and more "acoustic" properties of you guitar, the other pickups - humbucker or single coil - being run through a valve (or "tube" if you're a yank) amp, where a less Hi-Fi tone is actually considered optimal by many of us string slingers.
I'm not saying "ditch it," because I sense there's some great sounds to be had, but for distorted sounds I don't think it'll work as well. I'd say, go with the full bandwidth aspect and see if you can find some way of outputting that along with the standard jack output, or mebbe offer a "stereo" solution, the player can route your pickup through one signal chain and the other pickups through another one.

[jksuperstar]

Maybe you can just relabel it as "Digital Ready", and have it plug into sound cards directly with better-than-anything-else harmonic reconstruction.

[Inventor]

Well guys, there are already manufacturers who make pedals in miniature for installing into your guitar. Maybe what we should do is resell one of those pedals or tell the customer to buy one of those in conjunction with the kit. Does anyone have a link to such a company?

I should probably design a FET board but why reinvent that wheel when it's been done so well by others? I feel that an on-guitar signal booster would address all of your concerns, would it not?

Les

[Inventor]

Also, Oskar, it's no problem to accomplish a "stereo" output with this kit, you would just not use the switch and add a second jack to your guitar or even a stereo jack with a splitter on the other end (so you don't need two cables). Perhaps I should document all the options, or perhaps that is making things too complicated.

Les

[Fozzie]

I only just saw this pickup idea today. Cool idea!! I was wondering though, are the tuning-peg connections really necessary? Since the bridge is usually some conducting piece of metal, all strings should already be electrically connected, right? And often, a wire connects the bridge to ground; couldn't this wire be used to carry the signal instead of the wire that goes along the neck? I would be wary of having a wire along my strats neck (or am I mistaken that this is the case now?). Or is it for some reason necessary to connect all strings on both sides? And why?

[Inventor]

Hi Fozzie. It is necessary to make the connection at the tuning pegs and run a wire down the neck (or use the truss rod as a conductor) because electricity must flow in a wire sort of like water through a pipe. In other words, it flows in a circle around the circuit path. Maybe someone else could explain it better...

The grounded bridge provides us with a reference voltage - ground. Then the strings under the magnets act like tiny voltage sources and the length of the strings along the neck act like water pipes carrying the current to the headstock. We need to gather up that current and send it to the amplifier where it gets converted into a voltage for output to the jack.

The existing patents on similar techniques that we found all used non-standard configurations such as an insulated bridge and we didn't want to go that way because it would severely limit kit sales. So we ran a return wire down the neck. That's the story anyway.

Les

[Fozzie]

Thanks for the explanation, it makes sense. I was still thinking too much in the normal string-pickup interaction, but in this way the strings act a bit like the coils do normally I guess.

[Inventor]