Kiwi

We have a similar floor...

Today I ordered a version of the dual low pass filter by Lustihand that has been customised for guitar. After a bit of research we identified that the Alembic sweep filters used on the Aria went from 350Hz - 6Khz. I did a spot of investigation with my EMG strat and a parametric eq and that chime setting seems to need boost around 5KHz. The filters I've ordered will match the same (custom order) and there will be the same 9dB of boost that goes into the bass circuits. I may modify this later if it proves to be too noisy. I've also revised the circuit diagram because the output from the low pass filter is active rather than passive. So one of the changes will be the replacement of the blend pot with two inputs from the pickup selector into the summing amplifier before it reaches the integrated volume. I also have some 2 pole 6 position rotary selector switches so that just leaves tuners and knobs. I can't seem to find a chickenhead knob anywhere on the Chinese e-commerce sites. Plenty of oven knobs though...

Yes I had a Guitarist mag when they ran the fold out posters which featured this guitar one issue and there was no wood in it's construction - everything was 100% lucite. Nile has said on FB that his was made from perspex by some small (at the time) operation called "Guitarman" that operated out of a music store on 48th street NYC. Bernard actually had a matching bass which is in Nile's possession now:

I am! I spent 1990 in fine art school where I was subject to alt rock constantly by my thoughtful classmates. Over many months I gradually learned to develop a total loathing of it and, funnily enough, of fine art school also. Detachable Penis by King Missile was tolerable only because it was slightly interesting. I like Simple Minds, are they cool? I wasn't into the new wave thing although I'll reluctantly confess to having owned a pirate shirt at one point...without lacey frills [ahem]. But those days were all bass, I didn't really get serious about guitar until about maybe 7 years ago. In 1987 (I turned 17 then) had a term of paid bass lessons in September and my first lesson was a couple of days after Jaco died. My bass teacher showed me the newspaper clipping, and I didn't know who he was. So we did a lesson looking at Portrait of Tracy and he showed me how to play a few lines of Donna Lee before Mark King took over my interest for the next few years. Before then the first song I'd ever learned was New Years Day by U2 but that wasn't on guitar. So, on reflection, at 16 I was only just getting serious about bass and letting go of drums. And I discovered L42 which I suppose was life changing in the sense I obsessed about them for the next 7 years or so. But it wasn't guitar related.

I'm not cool enough to participate in this thread. I was a teenager in the eighties.

I think Nile Rodgers has one, he used it for the Get Lucky video. But his has a clear pick guard.

it really depends on the direction of the connections and how much slack there is in the wiring. There's going to be a lot of twisting.

It's legible but...well, funny you should mention the black ink...I can do any colour your heart desires though. Fuchsia perhaps? I was working on the schematic up until midnight and made some major changes that means (thankfully) I may only need 2 pole not 4 pole and I'm probably going to ditch the reverse phasing for now as it might not be needed. The whole point of doing this was to get my head around the switching arrangement as a form of escapism over CNY to stave off boredom. It worked. I've also been tweaking the body a little more and worked up two alternative designs using a Kahler 4200 X trem bridge, one has a glue in neck and the other is through. However there aren't any CAD blocks out there of the X trem so it seems like I'm going to have to buy one and work it up myself just like I did with the Wilkinson VS100. But Kahler's installation instructions are a whole load more helpful than Wilkinson's and drawn up in CAD.

Last night I decided to tackle the matter of whether phase switching was needed for positions involving two pickups. I did a bit of research on the sound of reverse phased pickups and found one vid where the vlogger had switched the phase of pickups in his telecaster and it sounded damn close to the Aria Esprit. So then the challenge was to adapt the original circuit diagram, but the more I looked into it, the more it seemed like a separate pole was needed to handle the earth/neg side...and I didn't have one spare because of the need to connect the middle pickup to two different poles. By late this morning I'd more or less given up and was in the process of typing an email to someone asking for help when it occured to me that instead of making the middle pickup switch from one side of the preamp to the other, why not make the neck and bridge swap from one side to the other and have the mid stay on the same channel while it's connected. I did a bit of mucking about with connections and found that not only could it work but it actually freed up one pole for use as an earth so it was possible to switch phasing for the bridge pickup in position 4 by swapping neg and positive around. I also had to wire up the neg side for all the other pickups to run through pole 2 as well but the point was it's possible. This also means I can go back to the plan to have a push pull vol pot to switch the preamp in and out. I have also found a supplier on Made-in-China who does 6 position 4 pole pots and they don't cost anywhere near the same as those made by Stewmac. This is subject to further tweaks, for example, I suspect pole 4 won't be needed either if I make better use of the vacant positions on pole 1.

I love Mesa Boogie amps and have searched on YouTube for review clips of the 5:25. It's supposed to be pretty versatile.

It's a way of describing a physical or electronic vibration. The ringing noise. Is it something physically vibrating or is it something feeding back electronically?

Sounds like an earth loop with something else attached to the mains. It could well be the other thing which is faulty. Maybe there's a piece of internet equipment not earthed properly.

is it an electronic or mechanical oscillation?

I think it tightens up the low end and boosts the midst a little.

Damn typo :)

Good luck! If you still can't find the problem then there might be a failed component somewhere but this would be very unusual. Ironic that none of us like in the UK, huh?

Well, I'm in the same boat as you. My nearest luthier is 600km away in Hong Kong and unaccompanied baggage attracts import duty. I've learned through trial and error to be self sufficient.

Is it just me or are you missing a .220k resistor and 680 pf capacitor on the master volume? Your tones seem wired up OK but I can't really tell what you're doing with the humbucker wiring. Given silence rather than hum is the main issue, I would suggest that you may be grounding the audio signal somewhere. Are you sure that the humbucker wiring is OK? Through a process of elimination, you should be able to trace the lack of beeps to a specific connection. Take the multimeter and set it to the connectivity mode (it'll make a noise when the two tips are brought together). First take everything off the pickguard and check if you are getting a signal from all the pickups by tapping the magnets with something metal while the circuit is plugged into an amp at low volume. If you hear a tap on all three after isolation from the pickguard then it means the live signal somewhere in the circuit is being grounded directly by the pickguard shielding rather than an earth wire. Check for potential contact between a pot, a joint or a wire and the pickguard. If you're not hearing a clear and distinctive tap on one of the selection settings then you know that the silent pickup is either broken or is wired incorrectly - probably with the live tag touching an earth connection somewhere. To test the pickup, put each tip of the multimeter on one of the leads with the pickup NOT selected and see if you get a beep. If you get a beep, the pickup is OK. To test the pickup selector, you'll need to place the black tip on the earth connection and test each pick up connection on every position of the selector switch, listening for any unexpected beeps. You'll need to pay attention to how the selector is wired, take your time and be ruthlessly methodical. If you're not hearing any taps from the pickups regardless of selection, it could mean the grounding is happening further down the line - either the tone or volume. Put the black tip against any part of the earth on a pot, turn all the pots up full and check for leakage by putting the red tip on each of the live out (middle) tags. Then check the in tags (right hand side when tags are at 12 o'clock) tags on the pot. When the pots are on full you should get beeps. If you don't then that means the earth is connected to the live signal somewhere between the locations you've put the multimeter tips. If still no joy then test the connections between live tags on different pots (turned on full) and see if you get beeps.

It's one of three builds that are planned. The second one is a "Sustain Machine" which is going to include using a Fernandes Sustainer from my Kleinberger copy, a laminated through body mahogany and maple neck and probably a Kahler 2300 series bridge for effortless divebombing harmonics. The third one is more along the lines of an MSG V2.0 with laminated mahogany/maple neck, another Wilkinson VS100C bridge and PRS Mira pickups (medium gain, much like Pearly Gates) maybe with a single coil if I can find one that matches. I know Martin Booth still makes the MSG for discerning clients. But his skills are in a different league to mine and he's resistant to the idea of three pickup guitars so I'd like to think I'm not treading on his toes here. Now I've put together a drawing specifically for the body fabricators and, in doing so, have been double checking and measuring (where possible) all the critical dimensions. It turns out that the Wilkinson bridge DXF block that I was using is out by a few millimetres in critical places, so I really need to nail the distance between the posts and the edge of the bridge rout. The pickup blocks I'd been using were fractions of a mm out as well which impacts on tolerances. It kind of goes to show that third party CAD blocks can't be trusted in most shapes and forms. It also means I'm going to have to partly disassemble my strat, which has a VS100C already installed, in order to measure the clearances. I also borrowed body dimensions from a Les Paul drawing to begin with but the body depth was too thick (56mm vs 44mm for MSG/43mm for strat) and the neck angle was wrong. Putting it right has taken more work than if I'd taken measurements off the MSG. Serves me right for taking short cuts, I guess.

With the rotary pickup selector, I needed to check what the specification needed to be. At the least, the following settings were going to be needed: Bridge only Bridge + middle (maybe out of phase) Bridge + neck Neck + middle (maybe out of phase) Neck only Normally for a three pickup strat style layout, a 2 pole rotary switch is enough. The neck and bridge pickups can share a pole because they aren't in use at the same time. But in my set up above, I would need at least a 3 pole switch, one for each pickup because I was combining bridge and neck. However, when the low pass filters were taken into consideration, there was also the challenge of how to sum three pickups into two channel eq. Luckily, a four pole rotary switch would probably work, if I summed the four poles into two sides. Each pair of poles into one of the two filters. But there was still the challenge of how to manage the middle pickup in the settings. Again that would be possible if I assigned two of the four poles to it and had the middle pickup switch from one channel to the other, depending on whether it was summed with the neck or bridge pickup. This arrangement does have the disadvantage of upsetting the filter settings with a pickup shift from position 2 to 4 but that would only really be felt if I was playing it live and I have no plans to do that. This is a proof of concept, a prototype which I'll use almost exclusively at home and it's main trick is going to be position 3 anyway so I put together a circuit diagram (without phase switching for positions 2 and 4) as proof of concept where position 1 was now just the piezo and all the others were moved forward by one. Lustihand also advised that in their latest edition circuits, separate boost switches were no longer needed, the boost was activated by push pull pots so there was a welcome visual simplicity and logic to the layout despite despite it being pretty versatile. But while I was browsing on the Stewmac website, I noted they offered 6 position rotary switches with four poles and I started to wonder whether that might be useful. Then I remembered I had a spare Graphtec acoustiphonic preamp left over from my Shuker Headless bass and a quick search of the Graphtec website revealed they offered piezo saddles for the Wilkinson VS100 series bridges. That got me thinking about a clean piezo/acoustic type sound for one of the six positions so I threw it into the diagram and it seemed to work. It would sit with the overall mission of the guitar for cleans. And I also had a spare hexaphonic PCB which opened up the possibilities of pitch-to-MIDI. Hmmm.

For the body I kept changing my mind for things beyond selecting alder for the wood. I started off wanting to do a body shape inspired by my Yamaha MSG deluxes (which Alan Murphy also played while with Level 42). Then reason grabbed hold and I started to ask myself what was wrong with just going with a stratocaster body. But I figured I might as well CAD the MSG body shape up and see what it looked like with the RS Esprit pickup layout. I was quite pleased with how it looked. OK so the dimensions here are all over the place, the scale is wrong and the spacing and size of the pickups is wrong, the bridge is slightly out and the Gibson ES346 inspired headstock is going to be at a 13 degree angle in this view. But it reminded me a bit of the PRS 305. While I was drawing the control layout, I started to think about the pickup selection and realised that a toggle switch wasn't going to be up to the job if phase switching in addition to neck+bridge was necessary. Another option was to use a rotary pickup selector like PRS. Exploring that that bought me onto reviewing the electronics package in more detail.

The hardware will consist of locking tuners as you might expect and for the bridge, I'm going to dive into my stash of stuff opportunistically collected over many years and use a Wilkinson VS100C convertible fulcrum vibrato. These haven't been made since the late 90's due to a patent claim by Gotoh but I happened to stumble across a stash of them being sold by Trevor Wilkinson's daughter on Ebay and bought three for my own personal use, one in gold and two in chrome. The other option was a Kahler 2300 series. Although this vibrato should fit a standard strat 2 post and rout, one can never been too sure, especially when commissioned from a Chinese supplier. The other thing I discovered when measuring the neck is that the scale length is 321mm nut-to-12th-fret which makes it around 25.2". Les Pauls are normally 24.75", PRS is 25" and Fenders are 25.5". The scale length will have a slight impact on pickup locations so this necessitates putting something together in CAD in order to remove as much potential for misunderstanding as possible. Luckily I'm a seasoned AutoCAD user. But it does impose a level of precision on things which is above and beyond what someone might work to in person. It also introduces more risk around areas where high precision is already needed, for example the neck pocket and bridge routs. This is because the measurements can specified and milled with tenths of a millimetre in tolerance but the measurements themselves are based on measurements with fractions of a millimetre. While it might not seem like much, that can make the difference between an acoustically coupled neck and something that just relies on glue to stop it moving about too much. And, to top it all off, if someone is going to commit to that level of precision by virtue of using CAD, then that level of precision can potentially be assumed by the manufacturer across the whole drawing, not just the bits that are measured carefully. So the whole process of manufacture still needs allowance for human fettling for some tolerances after carving. Assuming I'm doing the fettling, that means no finish as part of the fabrication process.

Originally I'd had in mind something that was a bit more Yamaha SG-ish but set in rather than through neck. But that never got off the ground because the manufacturer's sales representative decided that I wasn't going to buy enough from them. So the neck is a five piece laminate made from maple and mahogany with an ebony fingerboard. It's not the one piece maple job on the Aria because I prefer laminated necks for strength and wanted a bit of mahogany in the mix just for the mid range definition and slightly sweeter attack.

I've been a little obsessed with guitarist Alan Murphy in Go West for a number of years. The quality of my playing is a borderline insult to his legacy of talent but hasn't stopped me from a bit of a dive into 80's sounds. So to scratch the itch, I'm working on a new build which is a bit of a mish mash of some of the instruments he played in the late 80's. The primary mission is to recreate the cleans from his Aria RS Esprit. The Esprit is a very interesting guitar technically because it not only featured active electronics (which runs against the tide of prevailing opinion these days) but the circuitry was actually licensed from Alembic, a company whose reputation is founded on bass guitars. Alan was quoted in a Home Recording Studio article, published a month after he passed, that the Aria sounded like nothing else on the market for cleans. So that was the starting point for this build - crisp, shimmery cleans with not much bottom end. But, as previous builds will attest, I have a habit of making things far more complicated than they need to be. The Esprit has only two pickups - neck and bridge and both pickups are single coils with that middle 'pickup' a dummy hum cancelling coil. The neck and bridge together are where it shines (or shimmers if you will) but just having a guitar for that setting seemed like a wasted opportunity. So I felt the need to build in more options. The controls are volume (pull = active circuit on, activates a flashing red LED), Lo pass sweep neck pickup, bridge pickup boost switch at shelving point, lo pass sweep bridge pickup, neck pick up boost switch at shelving point and 3 way pickup selector switch. The alder body and 1 piece bolt maple neck are nothing remarkable and neither is the Floyd inspired fulcrum vibrato. That middle coil was at the centre of my concerns about 'waste'. Firstly because hum cancelling can be achieved more effectively through other means these days (stacked coils for example). Secondly because arguably the positions 2 and 4 on a strat are arguably some of the most evocative, conventional clean sounds. So it would be nice to have them as well but that wouldn't be possible if the middle position was just a coil. So I wanted to find a way to re-utilised that middle position for a pickup but without compromising what the Esprit does best. This means having to use pickups that don't need a dummy coil and that also throws into the air questions about wiring direction, phase and inductance. As it so happens, Aria commissioned Kent Armstrong to make the pickups for the RS Esprit based on information supplied by Alembic so after an exchange of emails with Aaron, we had a short chat on Skype about what Aria were up to. Aaron makes almost all my new pickups since Andy at Wizard retired. He can tap into all of the work that his father did for major boutique brands like Celinder, Ken Smith and others (as well as Aria). Aaron advised that most of the clean sound of an Aria probably came from the filters and that to get traditional strat sounds from positions 2 and 4, it was more phased on the phase relationship between the pickups than on the wiring. This meant that doing the RS Esprit thing AND the Fender 2 and 4 thing could be technically feasible. Aaron kindly offered to dust off the plans for the Aria pickups and wire up a set of improved coils when I was ready. I also did a bit of research on Alan's signal chain and found that he ran a clean and dirty channels separately. For overdriven sounds with Go West, the Aria was shunted into Alan's cherished Fender Super Champs and then into a Session power and JBL cab. But for clean sounds, he went straight into the PA to preserve that crystal high end. Here's a clip of Alan playing cleans into a Roland Dimension D and then direct through the PA at a shared billing gig in Japan with Go West, (or should I say 'Go Wet' given the inclement weather conditions.) The next trick was the filters and there are a few options available. First option was to use Alembic's Activator preamp. I happen to have one in my Pedulla fretless which I wanted to replace so I just needed to find another. But they're not cheap and the second option, replacement lo-pass filter circuits by Boogieman on Ebay are on the pricey side as well, now. I also caught wind of a low volume manufacturer called Lustihand who were making circuits for Wal and Alembic basses and contacted them through Facebook. A new double circuit was going to cost the same as a single, used Alembic Activator and Lustihand offered to tailor it for guitar frequencies so that might mean filtering anything out below 80Hz and above 8KHz. I'm not sure yet, will have to think about it some more. In the meantime, a set of Alembic Activator stratocaster pickups popped up on Reverb. Normally they'd be about 400 quid for a used set but the seller was asking for less than half that. So I snagged them after confirming with Mica at Alembic that they were indeed stacked humbuckers and therefore independently hum cancelling. While not quite as shimmery as the Series instruments, I bore Aaron's advice on the role played by the pickups in the RS Esprit in mind along with a few clips on Youtube that suggested they'd be good enough. All the while this was happening, I also had in mind a guitar neck that I'd commissioned for thirty quid in April...

Hide glue is fabulous stuff - nothing else out there beats it but it's not as convenient to use as gorilla glue. For things that need long term maintenance like fingerboards, I'd still use it if I had it.