Tuesday 29 May 2012

Guitar effects pedals

In preparation for the Mini Maker Faire in Brighton in September, we're busy designing and prototyping tiny guitar effects pedals which can be embedded behind a scratchplate.

As this involves hacking an actual instrument, it seems only sensible to keep track of where we've started from (if only so we go back to it, in the event of something going really wrong!)

The ideal starting point is not necessarily the wiring we start with - even really expensive guitars (for us, anything over about fifty quid is a really expensive guitar) can sometimes have quite shoddy wiring. So we're going to start with shielded wiring, to keep any hum and noise introduced by our effects "pedals" to a minimum.

Here's a typical three-pickup setup with shielding - note that the ground plane should be extended to the underside of the scratchplate, the tone and volume pot bodies and, if possible, the entire inside of the electrics cavity:

Shielded Wiring for Stratocaster guitar

3 comments:

  1. what do you get then?you get nothing, because that's where guitar hero fails. thinking that the videogame is somehow similar to playing in a band is like saying that doing cookies with your nephews is like running a three-star restaurant.
    online guitar lessons
    learn guitar

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm not quite sure what you mean Camelia. We're making guitar effects pedals, but instead of putting them inside stomp boxes, we're making the PCBs as small as possible, so they can fit inside a guitar body. This means hacking the actual guitar hardware, so this post gives us a starting point, should things go wrong and we need to reverse the process.

    Quite what this has with guitar hero, cookies, running a restaurant or my nephew, I'm really not sure!

    Thanks for spamming the blog with links to guitar lessons.
    I'll take a look; if they're genuinely useful, I'll leave them here. If not, your comment will be deleted when I get round to it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. A huge round of applause, keep it up.
    online

    ReplyDelete