You wouldn’t believe how often I get asked this, in the comment-responses to my electronics videos.  (I’ve just added this to my FAQ)

In the US, solder is pronounced "saw-der" (ˈsɑːdər) without the L. My family is Australian- I grew up doing electronics projects with my Dad, pronouncing it with the L as "sole-der" (ˈsɒldər).  I have to really make an effort to say it the American way.

Here’s an interesting etymonline entry that shows the original mid 14th century word was “sawd” with no “L”.   It seems unlikely that this is the reason Americans pronounce it without an “L”, but it’s as good an excuse as any

For reference, here is the entry for "solder” in the Oxford English Dictionary, including recordings.  The pronunciation with the L is listed as British English, while the other is listed as American pronunciation.

And here’s a fun article about other words with missing L’s.

Some users of guitar interface cables like my DIY cable project have noticed an unreasonable amount of feedback when using Apple’s GarageBand iPad app. 

Good news- Apple rolled out an update to GarageBand yesterday which appears to resolve this. 

Thanks PaulB for letting me know!

In this article, Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars gives an in-depth explanation of humbucker coil splitting and tapping.    You may also find my earlier posts useful:  Humbucker Wiring and Coil Splitting.

Thanks again to Pete for the permission to post this here!

October 2012

Howdy!

The topic for this tech tips newsletter will be Coil Splitting and Coil Tapping.

Coil Splitting and Coil Tapping are two methods which can be used to extend the range of tones on can get from a magnetic pickup.

First, a few definitions:

Coil splitting refers to disabling one of the two coils of a humbucking pickup by shunting that coil’s output to electrical ground.

Coil tapping is most often used to describe a single coil pickup which has a coil start and more than one coil end (output tap).

Because I intend to devote most of this article to Coil Tapping, let me start with Coil Splitting.

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Now that we’ve modeled the enclosure and printed a drilling template, we’re ready to jump out of Sketchup and into the real world. 

In this video, I’ll be demonstrating how to accurately drill the holes in a diecast aluminum 125B guitar pedal enclosure, preparing to install the electronics.  I’m using the drilling template we printed in part 2.  The pedal I’m building is a modified Ross compressor, using a printed circuit board purchased from GuitarPCB.

Funny, I just noticed while reviewing the final video edit that I was saying “barrel” instead of “bezel” for the LED bezel.  I guess I was channeling my inner Cooper.

Some of the resources used in this video:

• Carl Professional Rotary Trimmer
• Automatic punch
• 3/32” drill bit- always handy.  Buy a cheap 10-pack in case you break one.
• Unibit stepped drill bit.  I’ve since purchased this unbelievably cheap set from Harbor Freight which has steps down to 1/8”
• Round file
• Fractional calipers – one of my favorite tools
• Weller WES51 soldering station
• Pot back covers – or just make your own with heat shrink, or electrical tape
• See more pedal-building resources in the Intro to DIY Pedal Building

This is part 2 of my new series on building guitar effects pedals. 

This part of the project ended up being far more grandiose than I originally intended.  I started out planning to just show how to model this diecast aluminum 125B guitar pedal enclosure, to make sure my PCB and components would fit properly inside.   But by the time I was done with it, it was essentially a complete beginner’s how-to course for Google Sketchup.  (Note, Sketchup is now part of Trimble instead of Google).

To give you an idea of how long this took for me to complete, I started filming the intro and the Sketchup tutorial videos in June of 2011.  Over the last year, in the time-spaces between the rest of life, I’ve been gradually editing, revising, extending, and composing music for the project. 

In this tutorial, I start out with the absolute basics, and gradually pick up the pace, progressing to more and more advanced topics.  I divided the video up into 5 sections, but kept them all together in one 55-minute video.  In my previous multi-part videos, I had to split them into multiple YouTube clips, due to the YouTube length restrictions, but now that they’ve relaxed those for my account- I hope it’ll be better having it all in one video.

Here is the Sketchup file that I used in the tutorial if you’re interested: Download sketchup file.

Each section assumes a familiarity with the previous section topics.  Here’s the table of contents:

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This is the first post in a series on building guitar effects pedals.  It’s going to be a bit out of order- I’ll be starting with what is usually considered the finishing touches- putting the pedal in an enclosure,  modeling and laying out an enclosure in Google/Trimble Sketchup, drilling the enclosure, painting and finishing it. 

Then hopefully later, I’ll go back and do a project showing how to build a simple boost pedal from scratch.

This first video is the motivational intro: here are some of the things I’ve done, and yes, you can too!   If you have some interest in electronics and guitars, what better way to improve your knowledge?  You can get started with little or no electronics experience, and you’ll learn a bunch along the way. 

In part 2, I give a full beginner’s course in Google Sketchup.

Here are some useful links for pedal building:

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My new Epi Les Paul Tribute Plus arrived yesterday for my birthday, and it’s a beauty!  These things are hard to find- none of the local stores have inventory, and every online retailer is backordered.  I managed to get Guitar Center’s last one in the country(!) – from the store in Tonawanda, New York.  The store manager there was great- sent me some pics, played it for me to confirm it was all good, gave me a great July 4th discount, and shipped it over for free.   Thanks Chip!

Cosmetically, it’s really nice.  Clean, well-defined flamed maple top and cream bindings.  The cherryburst finish looks near-perfect- with rich warm coloring- not the bright overexposed yellow in the pictures at Guitar Center’s website.  The Grover locking tuners feel fantastically smooth, and the switch, knobs and jack all seem good.  And after some quick adjustments, it plays pretty well (but still needs some fine tuning).

The ’57 Classic pickups sound really dynamic, rich and beautiful – they’re warm when played gently, and crank when spanked. Love em.  There’s quite a range of sounds with the push/pull series/parallel switching on the tone knobs.  When a tone knob is pulled, the humbucker’s two coils are wired in parallel giving a lighter, brighter, thinner sound, somewhat reminiscent of a single coil (though different).    It’s completely different from the ultra-thick and heavy series-humbucker sound (knob pushed in).  This is a really versatile setup: a total of 8 different sounds using the 3 switches, not to mention the variations you can get by adjusting the volume knobs in the middle switch position.

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In my tone capacitor video, I demonstrated the typical use of the capacitor as a low-pass filter in a guitar tone control.   On a home stereo, this would be called a treble control, as it is used to roll off the high-end treble frequencies.

But what if you also want a bass control- a high-pass filter to roll off the low bass frequencies?

In the circuit diagram shown here, from the G&L S-500 guitar, you’ll find both a treble and bass control.  They call it their PTB system (which presumably stands for passive treble bass, but I’m just guessing here). 

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I wrote about my love of looping back in 2010, when the new JamMan Solo and JamMan Stereo were announced. 

Now, I’ve finally replaced my old Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro with a shiny new JamMan Delay.

This unique pedal combines a looper with a nice delay modeler.   It doesn’t do everything my old Echoplex did, but it’s a nice leap forward in technology- with stereo recording, tons of memory (and SD card expansion), stereo recording, USB connectivity and software librarian, not to mention some really nice delays.  I’ll talk about the features I’m missing in another post.

But before we get to happiness, let’s first talk about a major manufacturing issue, nearly a total deal-breaker.   If I hadn’t figured out a solution, I would have had to return the JamMan Delay and seek looper nirvana elsewhere.

When I first powered up the JamMan Delay and plugged it in to my Vox AC15, I was greeted with a faint but persistent “beep beep beep” sound, in time with the flashing tempo LED.  

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Update: 10/19/2011, added links to part #s at radioshack, mouser and mammoth.

Here’s the exciting conclusion to the series, following up the intro in Part 1, and the electronics course in Part 2.  

The main goal here is to cram all the parts into the narrow confines of the jack, so we don’t need to use an external box or enclosure. 

In addition to the cable and jack parts listed in Part 1, here are some of the things you’ll need:

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