I have the Dragonfly sustainer Fernandez with a pair of humbuckers. That circuit works really well. I use it as a midi synth guitar controller for the AXON system as it avoids the common dreaded 'midi note off' problems when the strings decay. With that rig you can play Jimmy Smith Hammond organ chords and hold them forever. The wammy bar makes for more fun.vvv wrote:I can't speak to the Decade but I have two Strat-stylee Sustainors and they are terrific, great necks, solid construction and finish and decent standard sounds, and then when you kick in the feedbacker ...
The guitar sounds are necessarily dark as the circuit adds a low pass filter on the audio signal to prevent local leakage/feedback from the pickup to the driver coil by the neck. The pickups are dark anyway, overwound to add output. I lessened that filter to allow a bit more natural string sound through, but it's a balancing act to get the tops back and still avoid frizzies from the local feedback magnetic fields.
Eddie Van Halen also has one and said he loved the way it works, just not the way it sounds, a bit too dark for plain old guitar playing. The strat pickup versions may have a bit more sparkle than the humbucker versions, but the humbucker versions sustain more evenly with less dead zones.
A fun trick live is to turn it on, throw it on the floor upside down and press up and down on the body with your foot. The wammy bar makes it sound like a diesel engine getting the pedal gassed. Hendrix would have loved one of these.
