Guitar With Hot-Swappable Pickups Lights Our Fire

May 11, 2021 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

There’s a story that goes something like this: Chet Atkins was playing his guitar when someone remarked, ‘that guitar sounds great!’ Mr. Atkins immediately stopped playing and asked, ‘how does it sound now?’ While it’s true that the sound ultimately comes from you and your attention to expression, we feel that different pickups on the same guitar can sound, well, different from each other.

However, this is merely speculation on our part, because changing pickups is pretty serious surgery, and there’s only one company out there making guitars with hot-swappable pickups. Since their low-end model is out of most people’s price range, [Mike Lyons] took one for the team and decided to build a guitar from scratch to test out various pickups of any size, from lipstick to humbucker. [Mike] can swap them out in under a minute, and doesn’t need any tools to do it.

[Mike] modeled the swapping system on that one company’s way of doing things, because why reinvent the wheel? The pickups are inserted through the back and held in place with magnets and a pair of cleverly-designed printed pieces — one to mount the pickup to, and the other inside the pickup cavity.

As far as actually connecting the things up, [Mike] went with a commercially-available quick-connect pickup solution that uses a mini four-conductor audio plug and jack. The body is based on the Telecaster, while the headstock is more Stratocaster — the perfect visual combination, if you ask us.

We are particularly fond of [Mike]’s list of caveats for this project, especially the requirement that it had to be built using only hand tools and a 3D printer. Although a drill press would have been nice to use, [Mike] did a fantastic job on this guitar. Whether you’re into guitars or not, this is a great story of an awesome build.

What, you don’t even have hand tools? You could just print the whole guitar instead.

Raspberry Pi Crazy Guitar Rig Turns You Into A Hard ‘N Heavy One-Man Band

October 7, 2020 by Sven Gregori 18 Comments

It’s a common problem: you’re at a party, there’s a guitar, and your plan to impress everyone with your Wonderwall playing skills is thwarted by the way too loud overall noise level. Well, [Muiota betarho] won’t have that issue ever again, and is going to steal the show anywhere he goes from now on with his Crazy Guitar Rig 2.0, an acoustic guitar turned electric — and so much more — that he shows off in three-part video series on his YouTube channel. For the impatient, here’s video 1, video 2, and video 3, but you’ll also find them embedded after the break.

To start off the series, [Muiota betarho] adds an electric guitar pickup, a set of speakers, and an amplifier board along with a battery pack into the body of a cheap acoustic guitar. He then dismantles a Zoom MS-50G multi-effect pedal and re-assembles it back into the guitar itself with a 3D-printed cover. Combining a guitar, effect pedal, amp and speaker into one standalone instrument would make this already an awesome project as it is, but this is only the beginning.

Touch screen and controls closeup — RPi touch screen running SunVox, plenty of buttons, and integrated multi-effect pedal on the left

So, time to add a Raspberry Pi running SunVox next, and throw in a touch screen to control it on the fly. SunVox itself is a free, but unfortunately not open source, cross-platform synthesizer and tracker that [Muiota betarho] uses to add drum tracks and some extra instruments and effects. He takes it even further in the final part when he hooks SunVox up to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. This allows him to automate things like switching effects on the Zoom pedal, but also provides I/O connection for external devices like a foot switch, or an entire light show to accompany his playing.

Of course, adding a magnetic pickup to an acoustic guitar, or generally electrifying acoustic instruments like a drum kit for example, isn’t new. Neither is using a single-board computer as effect pedal or as an amp in your pocket. Having it all integrated into one single device on the other hand rightfully earns this guitar its Crazy Guitar Rig name.

(Thanks for the tip, [alex]!)

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Axe Hacks: New Sounds For Your Electric Guitar Beginning From What Makes Them Tick

September 22, 2020 by Sven Gregori 30 Comments

Creating music is a perfect hobby for anyone into hacking, and the amount of musical hacks and self-made instruments we come across here makes that supremely evident. It’s just a great match: you can either go full-on into engineering mode as music is in the end “just” applied physics, or simply ignore all of the theory and take an artistic approach by simply doing whatever feels right. The sweet spot is of course somewhere in between — a solid grasp of some music theory fundamentals won’t hurt, but too much overthinking eventually will.

The obvious choice to combine a favorite pastime like electronics or programming with creating music would be in the realm of electronic music, and as compelling as building synthesizers sounds, I’ll be going for the next best thing instead: the electric guitar. Despite its general popularity, the enormous potential that lies within the electric guitar is rarely fully utilized. Everyone seems to just focus on amp settings and effect pedals when looking for that special or unique sound, while the guitar itself is seen as this immutable object bestowed on us by the universe with all its predestined, magical characteristics. Toggle a pickup switch, and if we’re feeling extra perky, give that tone pot a little spin, that’s all there is to it.

The thing is, the guitar’s electrical setup — or wiring — in its stock form simply is as boring and generic as it can get. Sure, it’s a safe choice that does the job well enough, but there’s this entirely different world of tonal variety and individual controllability locked inside of it, and all it really takes is a screwdriver and soldering iron to release it. Plus, this might serve as an interesting application area to dive into simple analog electronics, so even if guitars aren’t your thing yet, maybe this will tickle your creativity bone. And if bass is more your thing, well, let me be ignorant and declare that a bass is just a longer guitar with thicker, lower-tuned strings, meaning everything that follows pretty much applies to bass as well, even if I talk about guitars.

However, in order to modify something, it helps to understand how it functions. So today, we’ll only focus on the basics of an electric guitar, i.e. what’s inside them and what defines and affects their tone. But don’t worry, once we have the fundamentals covered, we’ll be all settled to get to the juicy bits next time.

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Building Your Own Guitar Pickup From Scrap

April 14, 2019 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Pickups are a key part of an electric guitar’s sound. You can spend a king’s ransom on tracking down just the right Vintage American Original 1950s Whatevers (TM) to put in your Spudocaster, but it’s not the only way. [Keith Decent] decided to make a pickup from scratch, using only materials found lying around the workshop. (Youtube, embedded below).

To build a pickup, you’ll want some magnet wire. In this case, [Keith] harvests this from an old transformer. A pickup body is then constructed from an old wooden ruler and some machine screws. A drill is used to spin the pickup body while the wire is roughly wound on, and everything is then held together with lashings of hot glue.

It’s a grungy build with a very Mad Max vibe – with the perfect aesthetic to suit [Keith]’s junkbox guitar build. The sound is good, but difficult to rate accurately when used on a guitar with slightly imperfect intonation. We’d love to hear it installed on a well-tuned body to get a better comparison.

It goes to show you don’t need to spend money on new parts and tools to get a build started. Sometimes you can make something perfectly functional with stuff you have lying around at home. Video after the break.

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DIY Scrap Guitar Really Shreds

May 31, 2018 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

[Keith Decent] recently got himself involved in a plywood challenge, and decided to make a single-pickup electric guitar. Since he is a prolific hoarder of scrap wood, the result is a lovely stack of laminates from many sources, including reclaimed cabinet doors. Really though, the wood is just the beginning—nearly every piece of this texture-rich axe started life as something else.

He’s made a cigar box guitar before, but never a bona fide solid-body electric. As you might guess, he learned quite a bit in the process. [Keith] opted for a neck-through design instead of bolting one on and using a truss rod. The face pieces are cut from his old bench top, which has a unique topology thanks to several years of paint, glue, and other character-building ingredients.

We love the geometric inlay [Keith] made for the pick guard, and the fact that he used an offcut from the process as a floating bridge. He also made his own pickup from bolts, an old folding rule, and reclaimed magnet wire from discarded wall wart transformers. Once he routed out the body and installed the electronics, [Keith] cut up an old painting he’d done on plywood to use as the back panel. Our only complaint about this beautiful guitar is that he didn’t design the back piece to be dinosaur side out. Shred past the break to give her a listen.

[Keith] wound his pickup with a little help from a drill, but a DIY pickup winder might have caused him less grief.

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Rocking An Acoustic Guitar By Making It Electric

August 3, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 18 Comments

Brothers [Armand] and [Victor] took their acoustic guitar to the next level, making their own pickups to turn it into an electric guitar. The result is that awesome electric guitar sound.

The pickups are homemade magnetic pickups. Each string has a steel bolt behind it with three ceramic magnets on each bolt. A coil is also wrapped around all the pickups. That coil is what’s connected to the wires going to the amplifier. When a string vibrates, it changes the magnetic field in the pickup which induces a current in the coil and that is then sent on to the amplifier to be altered as desired and turned back into sound. Of course that meant the guys had to replace their nylon strings for steel ones.

With just the volume amplified the sound isn’t very different but when the amplifier’s gain is turned up and the volume turned down the sound is undoubtedly electric. As you can hear in the video below, Johnny B. Goode, Paint it Black and Satisfaction take their acoustic guitar’s sound to a whole new level.

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CNC Upgrade To Guitar Pickup Winding Machine

June 18, 2016 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

The idea of winding inductive guitar pickups by hand is almost unthinkable. It uses extremely thin wire and is a repetitive, laborious process that nevertheless requires a certain amount of precision. It’s a prime candidate for automation, and while [Davide Gironi] did exactly that, he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his earlier version. He now has a new CNC version that is more full-featured and uses an ATMega8 microcontroller.

[Davide Gironi]’s previous version took care of winding and counting the number of turns, but it was still an assisted manual system that relied on a human operator. The new upgrade includes a number of features necessary to more fully automate the process, such as a wire tensioner, a wire guide and traverse mechanism (made from parts salvaged from a broken scanner), and an automatic stop for when the correct number of turns has been reached.

All kinds of small but significant details are covered in the build, such as using plastic and felt for anything that handles the wire — the extremely fine wire is insulated with a very thin coating and care must be taken to not scratch it off. Also, there is the need to compute how far the traverse mechanism must move the wire guide in order to place the new wire next to the previously-laid turn (taking into account the winding speed, which may be changing), and doing this smoothly so that the system does not need to speed up and slow down for every layer of winding.

This system is still programmed by hand using buttons and an LCD, but [Davide Gironi] says that the next version will use the UART in order to allow communication with (and configuration by) computer – opening the door to easy handling of multiple winding patterns. You can see video of the current version in action, below.

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