Pickup Project Ideas

[jbforrer]

Greetings All,

My first post here -- been lurking for a while reading all the useful posts.

Just a hobby for me; a life-long tinkerer with building guitars, amps, all sorts of effects, also experimental pickups. Thought perhaps this little gem of a FET buffer/pre-amp may be of interest. Nothing new or revolutionary, something I found useful in my own projects.

1. Cleaning up that loss of higher frequencies due to cable capacitance or non-optimal impedances. Here the gadget fits inside a jack plug at the guitar side of the cable (idea from Don Tillman's Web Page, www.till.com).



2. An active quad or hex pickup ... possibility for balancing output per string.



3. Buffering pickup output(s) prior to passive components. Shown on top of a mini volume pot (25K).



4. Converting a passive pickup into an active device.



Surface mount design & assembly was part of my previous life. I assembled a small quantity of these PCBs for my own use, but have a few spare if anyone is interested in something like this.

Thanks much.

JB.

[Spence]

Very cool JB. That all looks really good.

[mkat]

Yep, great ideas. I've been thinking about using SMDs for various circuits for a while.

[David Schwab]

Those are nice and small!

[Mark Hammer]

Nice.

Just gotta give up coffee and smokes before trying it.

I'm trying to whip myself up a DIY hex pickup to try out some parallel processing and p-to-V, and made myself some tiny boards for SMT dual op-amps; essentially to emulate the Roland GK electronics. While soldering the chips is simple enough (I don't smoke, and limit myself to 2 cups of coffee a day), the SMT resistors are another matter, so I find it is simple enough to just use a fine tipped carbide drill and 1/8W through-hole resistors in conjuction with the larger SMT components. The nice thing is that since the chips are on the same side as the copper, and the resistors are very low profile, the resistors can go on the opposite side with very little trouble.

[jbforrer]

Thanks much for the feedback.

Mark, it seems you been there --- true about a steady hand and effects of coffee. Those little 0603 resistors ... one sneeze and its gone forever. Fortunately, I have a really nice SMD assembly workstation with stereo microscope, good lighting, and other handy tools for doing prototypes and small batch assemblies. Good luck with your hex pickup electronics ... wonder whether you are making your own pickup assembly; the miniature humbucker like the GK2 has?

JB.