A little DIY - How to make your own Sustainer

I've received a request for a better explanation on how the sustainer works.
Well it's pretty simple really. At leas my version is at any rate.

All you need is a handful of parts and it can be made for less than $20

Ideally you'll have a strong magnet. I've used old strat pickups, but Alnico Bar Magnets are available on Ebay pretty frequently.
The Bar magnet will probably give you a better result.

Apart from the pickup, my sustainer was built from stuff readily available from the local electronics store.

The thinnest enamel coated wire that I found is .25mm, a bit smaller would be better (tighter coil), but this was all I had to work with. On the strat pickup with the orignial wire removed I wound a coil to 8 ohms. I think it was 160 turns of the pickup. There is a handy turn calculator online here where you input your wire gauge, magnet size and desired resistance.

Incidentally the 33awg roll from Jaycar is 16 ohms +- an ohm.

To power it all I used a simple 386 chip based circuit that can deliver 1/4watt at 8 ohms.
It comes in kit form and usually costs less than $9

Simply connect the tip of your guitar jack to the input of the circuit and the sustainer coil to the speaker terminals.
If it doesn't do anything, try reversing the speaker wires as there may be a humbucking effect.

Every coil I've made has been different, some strings will feedback more than others depending on how sloppy the wire wrapping has been done.

Unfretted Forum Thread

Jagmaster Sustainer Guitar

Gretsch Sustainer Project

Original

Updated

2nd half of this song shows my first sustainer in action.

The infinite sustain project

This week the story is about my friends guitar.
It's a black Gretsch Pro Jet (I think). A ncie guitar, and despite having a large portion of the body chambered, it's quite heavy. The existing pickups are Mini Humbuckers, but I don't know much about them.
They're stock and have a nice twang to them, not really like a Fitlertron, but definitely down that road. Nothing like a PAF.

We both agree that the guitar sounds great as is, which is why it's taken him some time to make to move to have it "upgraded" to his favourite pickup configuration. An EMG 81.

I originally though he was crazy. But having done the install and testing, I have to admit, it sounds great.

The job was fairly straight forward as EMG supply the wiring harness, the only soldering needed is to and from the volume pot. Got that sorted and played a little bit. The tone of the guitar still had it's nice country feel, but the EMG was clear and has a great dynamic range. Very quiet too. My flat has severe problems with EMI and as such is a good test bed for the sorts of issues that may come up out in the real world.

The routing on the body is wide enough to just drop in a humbucker, though the length of the rout is big enough to put a non dog ear P90 pickup in. I cut some pine and shaped it to fit at either end of the pickup and painted them black to match the body. Once that was done I added a simple chrome pickup ring that I'd had  in my parts drawer. No drilling into the guitar was needed as the screws just slid between the pine and the body, which in turn secured the pickup at the desired height. The mod is so simple that the pickup can't be adjusted, but that's fine since, it's already at the optimum distance from the strings.

The other part of this mod, is one I've done on a few other guitars over the last couple of years. A home made sustain driver. It's pretty easy to do. All you need is a decent magnet and some 0.25mm enamel coated wire for the driver coil and a 1/4w LM386 based amplifier to power it. The output of the bridge pickup is fed into the amplifier and the coil acts like a resonant feedback (not microphonic) that one might get from a loud amp.

I used a Strat style pickup bobbin to mount the driver on. With the gauge of wire I used, you only need 160 turns to get to 8ohms. With some experimentation I have found that the best results are obtained by winding directly to the magnet, rather than just the pole pieces. This has the added benefit of not requiring the poles to line up with the strings as the magnet is a continuous bar.

Mounting the sustainer in a P90 sized hole presented a problem.

First I cut a piece of ply and shaped it to fit in the cavity, but this was going to be a pain to rout as I didn't have a template available and it was raining (my work area is outside). After messing with a small hand saw for a time, I remembered that there was an old chewed up Strat scratch plate in my pile of bits. All that needed to be done was cut to size.

This was easy in principal, in practice getting the coping saw to cut smoothly was a pain. The blade that I have is a little to coarse and kept getting stuck. I managed to file it all down and fit it in the lot fairly easily and the precut hole was prefect for dropping the bobbin to the required height.

In all it probably took four hours to get it all together, but the end result is pretty cool and I'm sure he'll be happy with his country metal noise monster!

My sustainer tutorial

Jagmaster Project

2009 - J&D Luthiers Jagmaster - Modded to the max!

I picked this sucker up at the local pawn broker (can you see a pattern here?).
The electrics were shot, it wasn't in the best condition, but hey that is exactly what I was after.

You may have noticed that I sort of have an obsession for modifying things. Not everything I get, but things which need just a little bit of awesome added. That's what this guitar needed.
But it got a whole bunch of awesome poured all over it.

The first thing I did was replace the stock tremolo with a Stepmax tremolo, which allows full vibrato (both up and down) in the same place as a Fender style synchronised tremolo which only allows down and return to pitch.

This system works pretty well, but might not be to everyone's  taste. I will say that it's a lot easier to setup than a Floyd Rose style tremolo (I'll stick to my vintage style pivot tremolo thanks!).

After this I added in a Varitone capacitor bank, which allowed for 8 or 12 capacitors to be selected for different EQ curves. Fortunately the pickups that J&D used on this guitar were of the four wire variety and afforded the opportunity to add switched to split the coils and invert the phase of the humbuckers.

I also changed the neck to a reverse headstock Fender style, just for looks. It made tuning the damn thing a little harder though. Even so, it did look pretty sweet.

The coolest mod by far was the Sustainer.
I wrapped 8ohms of wire around one half of the neck pickup and hooked that up to a simple 386 based amplifier which was driven by the bridge pickup. The effect is similar to controlled feedback by standing in front of an amplifier and holding a note.

Sure Fernandes do it better, but I did it for about $12 in parts and a couple of hours labour.
If I've done my math right, it should be able to deliver 108 individual tones plus the sustainer function.

The guitar was sold so that I could get the Guyatone LG127t I posted about a few months back.
I have no idea who bought it, but I hope it's bringing them some far out sounds.

Infinite Sustain Project

DIY Sustainer Tutorial