guitar

186 Articles

A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

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Rock Out Without Getting Knocked Out

June 27, 2024 by 20 Comments

It’s a constant battle for musicians — how to practice your instrument without bothering those around you? Many of us live in apartments or shared accommodation, and having to wait until the apartment is empty or only being able to practice at certain times of day can be restrictive, especially if you need to practice for an upcoming gig or if the creative juices start flowing and it’s 3 AM! [Gavin] was having this issue and started developing Porter, a guitar/bass practice device which works with all effects pedals and is portable and rechargeable. So you can grind away your epic heavy metal solo no matter the time of day!

While there have been similar solutions, many musicians weren’t satisfied with the sound and often couldn’t support inputs from distortion pedals. They usually chewed through batteries and were just not a great solution to the problem. [Gavin] has spent the last two years fine-tuning the design. It’s a fully analog design, with built-in rechargeable batteries to boot. So it not only sounds great, but it can last as long as your practice session does with a 15-hour runtime when fully charged!

Initially, the project began as a headphone amplifier but morphed into a design specifically for guitar and bass, with preamp and power amp stages and adjustable input impedance – 500kΩ for guitars and 1MΩ for bass. The latest revision also changed to a different power amp that further reduced THD and led to an even better sound. The schematics are up on the Hackaday.io project page, but [Gavin] is also hoping to do a crowdfunding campaign to get these devices out into the hands of guitarists everywhere!

Optical Guitar Pickup Works With Nylon Strings

March 4, 2024 by 68 Comments

Electric guitar pickups rely on steel strings interfering with a magnetic field, the changes in which are picked up with coils of wire. That doesn’t work with nylon strings, because they don’t tend to perturb magnetic fields nearly as much, beyond some infinitesimal level that some quantum physicist could explain. So what do you do? You follow [Simon]’s example, and build an optical pickup instead.

The concept is simple. You place an LED and a phototransistor in a U-shaped channel, and place it so that the string runs through it. You repeat this for each string. Thus, as a string vibrates, it interrupts the light travelling from the LED to the phototransistor. This generates a voltage that varies with the frequency of the string’s vibration. Funnily enough, this type of pickup will work just fine on both nylon and steel strings, if you were so inclined to try it.

[Simon] designed a nifty PCB with six LED-phototransistor pairs (using off-the-shelf interruptor sensors) for use with a nylon-stringed guitar. He reports that sound from the strings comes through clearly, but that there is some noise that is evident in the pickup’s output, too. Listening to the demo, it seems to capture the sound of the nylon strings well, it’s just a shame that the noise floor is so high.

If you prefer your guitar pickups to be the regular magnetic kind, you can always wind your own from scrap. Demo after the break.

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Building A Loop Station With An RP2040

January 11, 2024 by 9 Comments

Loop stations are neat things, able to replay one or more loops of audio over and over again while you perform over the top of them. Musicians like [Marc Rebillet], [Reinhardt Buhr], and [Dub FX] have made careers out of this style of performance. [Yaqi Gao], [Xiaoyu Liang] and [Alina Wang] decided to build a loop station of their own, using the popular RP2040 chip.

At its simplest, a loop station must take in audio, record it, and then play it back. Generally, it can do this with several tracks and mix them together, while also mixing in the incoming audio as well. The group achieved this by inputting a guitar signal to the chip via an amplifier and the onboard analog-to-digital converter. The audio can be recorded as desired, and then played back via an external digital-to-analog converter. Live audio from the guitar is also passed through to allow performing over the recorded sound. The group also used an external half-megabyte FRAM chip to allow storing additional audio sample data, which can be trucked out over serial and saved.

It’s not the cleanest loop station in the world, with a relatively low sample rate causing some artifacts. Regardless, it definitely works, and taught the group plenty about working with digital audio in the process. For that reason alone, we’d call it a success.

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$30 Guitar Build Shows What You Can Do With Amazon Parts

December 22, 2023 by 20 Comments

Most guitarists buy their axes fully assembled from big names like Fender, Gibson, and… maybe Yamaha? Sure. But there are a dedicated set that relish in mixing and matching parts and even building and assembling their own instruments. [Danny Lewis] decided to see what he could do with the cheapest guitar parts from Amazon and a body of his own design, and he put together something pretty passable for just $30.

The wood for the body was cut on a bandsaw, and was essentially free scrap sourced from old furniture. [Danny] went for an unconventional design using a roughly Telecaster outline and large cutouts either side of the bridge. The neck was free, by virtue of being an old Harmony neck sourced off Craigslist. We’d have preferred to see what could be done with a cheap Amazon neck, but it nonetheless fits the vibe of the build.

The guitar then received a $9.99 pickup and controls, an $8.80 solidtail bridge, and $11 tuning machines for the headstock. Strung up, it actually sounds passable. We’d want to throw it on a proper amp and give the whole thing a setup before fully assessing it, but hey, for $30, it’s hard to go wrong.

We do love some hacky guitars around here; we’ve even featured some with surprise effects gear built into the bodies. Video after the break.

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Making A Guitar Go To Eleven, The Hard Way

December 21, 2023 by 10 Comments

At the end of the day, all it takes to make a guitar go to eleven is a new knob. Making the knob is another thing — that takes a shop full of machine tools, the expertise to use them, and a whole bunch of time. Then again, if you’re pressed for time, it looks like a 3D printer will do nicely too.

While the 3D printing route is clearly the easier option, it sure seems as if [Chronova Engineering] is more about the journey than the destination. In need of some knob bling for an electric guitar, he takes us through the lengthy process (nicely summarized in the video below) of crafting one from a bar of solid brass. Like all good machining projects, this one starts with making the tools necessary to start the actual build; in this case, it’s a tool to cut the splines needing to mate with the splines on the guitar’s potentiometer shaft. That side quest alone represents probably a third of the total effort on this project, and results in a tool that’s used for all of about 30 seconds.

Aside from spline cutting, there are a ton of interesting machining tidbits on display here. We particularly liked the use of a shaping technique to form the knurling on the knob, as opposed to a standard rotary method, which would have been difficult given the taper on the knob body. Also worth noting are the grinding step that puts a visually interesting pattern on the knob’s top surface, as well as the pantograph used to etch the knob’s markings.

Congrats to [Chronova Engineering] for a great-looking build, and the deep dive into the machinist’s ways. If you’re still interested in custom brass knobs but don’t have a machine shop, we can help with that.

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Two-Channel Guitar Stomp Box Makes Momentary Switches Latching

November 19, 2023 by 12 Comments

When we first saw [Maarten Tromp]’s article about a “momentary latching switch” for guitar effects pedals, we have to admit to being a bit confused. When it comes to push-button switches, “momentary” and “latching” seem to be at odds with each other, with different mechanisms inside the switch to turn one into the other. What gives?

As it turns out, [Maarten]’s build makes perfect sense when you consider the demands of a musical performance. Guitar effects pedals, or “stomp boxes,” are often added to the output of electric guitars and other instruments to change the signals in some musically interesting way. The trouble is, sometimes you only need an effect for a few bars, and the push-on, push-off switches on many effects pedals make that awkward.

[Maarten]’s idea was to build a stomp box with momentary switches that act as inputs to an ATtiny2313 microcontroller rather than directly controlling the effect. That way, a bit of code can determine how long the switch is tapped, and activate a relay to do the actual switching accordingly. A short tap of the button tells the microcontroller to latch the relay closed until another tap comes along; a long press means that the relay is held open only as long as the button is held down.

Yes, he could have used a 555, a fact which [Maarten] readily acknowledges, but with some loss of flexibility; he currently has the threshold set at 250 milliseconds, which works for his performance style. Changing it would be a snap in code, as would toggling the latching logic. A microcontroller also makes expansion from the two-channel setup shown here easier.

Looking for more effects pedal action? We’ve got a bunch — a tube-amp tremolo, an Arduino Mega multipedal, a digital delay line. Take your pick!