Latest thing you've built?

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dfuruta
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Latest thing you've built?

Post by dfuruta » Sun Apr 10, 2016 8:23 pm

Following the "Latest gear you've acquired" thread, what's the most recent thing you've been working on?

I'll start with a couple. Here's a DI box I made recently for bass guitar:
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dfuruta
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Post by dfuruta » Sun Apr 10, 2016 8:26 pm

These bars are surplus from a company that made Orff instruments - got them from a friend who didn't want them. Put together a quick frame out of PVC pipe. Looks terrible, but the sound is nice and mellow.

Image

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A.David.MacKinnon
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Post by A.David.MacKinnon » Mon Apr 11, 2016 6:19 am

Wow. You're way more ambitious than I am at the moment. My latest project was pulling apart a EH Switchblade A/B pedal and replacing the jacks with a TRS in and mono out. I use it to switch between loops running from an iPod. The stock Switchblade had a huge amount of cross talk.

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Post by Jim Williams » Mon Apr 11, 2016 8:04 am

I built a tube mic pre last month. It was a design I had from 1992. It used a Jensen JT-115 input transformer, a 12AX7A tube and a 12BH7 output driver.

Gain is active, set with a dual antilog pot off each cathode. I used high end film caps and resistors. Gain is variable from 26 to 65 db with a DI input and the usual pad, phase reverse and phantom switches.

The output is unbalanced off the driver tube. I get .003% THD without any negative feedback. Bandwidth is 5 hz to 80k hz, limited by the input transformer. Noise is -127.5 db EIN.

It sounds close to my fast current feedback transistor preamps. I once had planned to build these commercially until everyone came out with a cheaper version. Then the record biz broke.
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ubertar
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Post by ubertar » Mon Apr 11, 2016 9:24 am

Just finished a new 6-string, movable fret, interchangeable microtonal neck that shares a body with a three-course version:

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Right now, it's set to 14 tone equal temperament, which is a good tuning for jazz, IMO. You can see a little bit of the three-course neck in the bottom right corner of the pic.

I got it ready in a hurry last week for a show Saturday at the public library (Mulberry Street branch of the NYPL). I was booked for 90 minutes and was worried I wouldn't have enough to play without it.

My first movable fret, microtonal electric guitar was back in '92, but the design was very different.

A few weeks ago, I made this, a triple-fuzz pedal:

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The three-course neck has a separate pickup on each course. The pedal has a separate input and fuzz circuit for each signal, then combines them at the end. This avoids the intermodulation distortion you'd get from fuzzing them all together that can muddy things up... since the chords in the tunings/scales I use can be pretty dissonant, that mud would be distracting. A regular pedal enclosure wasn't big enough so I used the metal bank I had as a kid! At some point, I'll make a six channel fuzz and install a hex pickup in the 6-string neck, but I just wanted to get this ready as quickly as possible so I'd have at least a couple days to practise with it before the show!

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Post by dfuruta » Mon Apr 11, 2016 9:49 am

Jim: very impressive specs from a tube pre! Is it something you're still thinking about doing commercially? Would love to see a schematic if not.

ubertar: that fuzz is nutty!
would you be willing to elaborate a bit on that guitar's construction? i've been looking for a movable fret guitar myself, actually...Tolgahan ?oğulu isn't selling his system currently, and i'm not sure what else is out there.

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Post by kslight » Mon Apr 11, 2016 10:22 am

#peoplewaymoremechanicallygiftedthanme

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Drone
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Post by Drone » Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:23 am

Gutbucket bass (well cat-bucket bass) to amuse my kid.

Image
The previous statement is from a guy who records his own, and other projects for fun. No money is made.

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ubertar
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Post by ubertar » Mon Apr 11, 2016 1:33 pm

Hey dfuruta,

You can PM me questions... I'm not going to do a how-to, but I have made this kind of thing for people on request.

I made a similar, but shorter neck and set it on a tele body, for a guy in Australia:
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That has a hex pickup in bridge position. Don't mind the slantedness of the frets... I hadn't actually set them; I just put them on loosely for the pic before shipping it off to Oz.

I also made an electric setar (Persian instrument) for another guy, a while back. That has movable frets too-- a different design, somewhere in-between the traditional ones and what I do now.
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vvv
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Post by vvv » Tue Apr 12, 2016 1:01 pm

Please to explain: are the frets actually movable on rollers and/or tracks, perhaps to use different tunings/intonations? If so, how do you "set" and stabilize them?

Expiring minds wanna know!
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ubertar
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Post by ubertar » Tue Apr 12, 2016 4:20 pm

They're not on rollers or tracks... they're movable and removable. They tighten or loosen with a tool. You're right, that's for different tunings. I have mine set to 14 equal divisions of the octave right now. 7 equal divisions is a scale used in various parts of Africa, and is the grandmother of the blues, so 14 equal is a good choice for jazz, IMHO.

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ubertar
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Post by ubertar » Tue Apr 12, 2016 4:26 pm

Drone wrote:Gutbucket bass (well cat-bucket bass) to amuse my kid.
That's awesome, and your son is lucky to have you for a dad, but the picture is HUGE.

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Drone
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Post by Drone » Tue Apr 12, 2016 5:40 pm

Yeah, I keep forgetting this forum doesn't scale things like some do.
The previous statement is from a guy who records his own, and other projects for fun. No money is made.

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Post by Scodiddly » Wed Apr 13, 2016 8:01 pm

A way to measure AC power harmonics and noise in the audio band. It's a 9v wall-wart into a voltage divider to knock the voltage down, from there into either a laptop interface and Smaart software, or an iPhone and a spectrum analyzer app.

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Post by ashcat_lt » Thu Apr 14, 2016 3:09 pm

Scodiddly wrote:A way to measure AC power harmonics and noise in the audio band. It's a 9v wall-wart into a voltage divider to knock the voltage down, from there into either a laptop interface and Smaart software, or an iPhone and a spectrum analyzer app.
There was somebody over on diystomboxes forum asking about plugging a power supply into a speaker to actually listen for noise. Seemed strange to me, but...

I feel kinda lame looking at the rest of this thread. Today I made a pair of tinned wire>1/4" TS speaker cables out of an old orange extension cord.

Before that the last time I warmed up the iron was to take half the cables from a 8 channel TRSM>XLRM snake and convert them to pseudo-balanced. Unfortunately, all of those buzz really badly with every source I've tried so far. Not sure what the deal is there, but I haven't bothered to try to sort it out because the four I didn't fuck with have been working well enough.

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