/diy/ - Do It Yourself

[Anonymous No.46809]

Hello Holy /diy/vers

This is a very long shot, but do any of you have experience wiring guitars? I'm looking at getting a sustainer for mine, but putting it in the middle position, and not using it as a pickup at all. In other words, all it does is sustain, and the harmonic if possible.

Is this possible currently? Would I be better going with a Fernandes or a Sustainiac? Please help if you can.

[Anonymous No.46965]

I'm great at crazy exotic guitar wiring, but I don't have much experience with the sustainers, and I'm not sure about if they have to be the selected pickup in order to sustain. I heard they simpley produce string vibrations in order to create the sustain, which leads me to believe you could just have it in the middle and select another pickup to use, while getting the sustain. If not maybe you could use the number 2 and 4 positions of a 5 way switch in order to blend the sustainer with the bridge or neck pickup. But as I said, I don't have much experience with sustainers, and everything I said could possibly be complete bullshit.

[Anonymous No.47034]

on a similar note, i am brand new to guitar wiring, and have taken the components out of an old shitty guitar, and intend to rebuild it as a cigar box style, i marked which wires go where, and cut each wire that i had to in the center, for a shitty junker thing will it work to wind the wires together and wrap with electrical tape? or is it an absolute must to solder?

[Anonymous No.47066]

>>47034
Really, really recommend just spending $20 on a soldering iron and solder. It will work like that, but you will likely get a lot of scratching sound and possibly grounding issues. Not even worth it on a junker if you want to even play the thing with some modicum of reliability.

And OP in my experience keep internal wiring to passive electronics. I am somewhat of a purist but I can guarantee you will be able to find a better sustain style pedal than an internal mod board dollar for dollar. Good luck.

[Anonymous No.47762]

Currently re-wiring a guitar from 1963 which sat in it's case for the last 20 years. Anything is possible, but I would take the advice of other people. You can't just chuck the whole thing in, take >>47066 advice, you'll be working with hardly any space and grounding problems everywhere.

[Anonymous No.47865]

Bumping the fuck out of this, totally relevant to m interests etc

[i peg myself with tubes !MpRWP1Acjo No.47887]

Fernandes and Sustainiac are a ripoff, and a compressor or a fuzz pedal will only give you limited sustain. Basically what you have to do is a small speaker to drive the strings infinitely, cased into a really slim pickup. Oh yes, you'd have to be willing to gut some pickups, these will only work as the "feedback" pickup after modding it.

This guy has made perhaps the most comprehensive tutorial on the net on sustaining pickup configurations:
http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic=24211
Single coils are recommended here (which is what I also made for a friend), but I guess a humbucking one is also ok, given you do it conciously enough.

At some point you'd have to make some calculations for the pickup itself, here's a great calculator. It's already configured for a sustainer:
http://pickups.myonlinesite.com/pickup.php?unit=mm&cl=60&cw=6&ch=3&bw=14&bt=1&am
p;ends=round&wd=0.2&id=0.22&show=on&avt=100&adj=ohms&avo=8

The driver amp can be way simpler than the ones offered by kit sellers. I tried several circuits and the Fetzer Valve worked best for me, your mileage may vary:
http://www.runoffgroove.com/fetzervalve.html
Other drivers that report success around the net are the Ruby (also at runoffgroove), or some kind of pulse width modulating 386 based amp.

[i peg myself with tubes !MpRWP1Acjo No.47889]

Oh yeah, there's also some russian guy who does all of this with a piezo element under the neck pickup and a 386 driver,

[Anonymous No.48203]

>>47887
This is great dude, exactly the shit I was looking for! Would I be able to create the harmonics too, or would they only be possible by using the sustainer as the pickup that is creating noise, if that makes sense.

Anyway THANK YOU!

[peskywinnets No.48562]

I make sustainers (see here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=106Se7AHknc )...it's highly unlikely any of the commercial sustainers will work in the middle pickup, and they *definitely won;t work in harmonic mode' I will be selling a sustainer for the middle pickup position in the new year....but it's not possible tom have harmonic mode in that location.