Simulating Pickups & Splitting Signals

SHO Clone & Pickup Sim

Last weekend I decided to make Jack Orman's Pickup Simulator. I've had the parts collected in a little bag for a long, long time. It's a really simple circuit, and one that I really should have built earlier (say back in 2009).

The purpose of the Pickup simulator is to deal with certain pedals that prefer to be fed straight from the guitar and not through the buffer of another pedal (EG: Fuzzface, Big Muff, Octavio).

I didn't have the Mouser 42TL019 transformer on hand, but I did have the Mouser 42TL018 which has a similar enough primary coil value.

The pickup simulator works really well, but that's not the only reason I wanted to make it.

I usually record in stereo with one effected and one dry track. The drawback with this is the guitar had to go into a pedal that had stereo outputs. Which by default, introduces a buffer for each channel.

Since the schematic shows that the transformer can be tapped to obtain two different impedances, I figured it should also be useful in sending the signal to two destinations. Even five, if you don't mind a bit of transmission loss in the secondary coil.

Both of my guesses turned out to be correct.

Splitting the primary gives the best signal, and improved the character of the guitar signal significantly when compared to the buffer split.

One side of the stereo pair goes through effects, the other simply goes into an analogue amp/speaker simulator. It was on the clean side that I noticed the most improvement (Especially on the Bass VI).

This is a no frills tool, but it has the potential to bring some life back into otherwise lifeless sounding effects.

This has been one of my cheapest builds, and its probably the simplest. I wish I had invented it, this should really be available as an off the shelf product.

Until next time.

T.A.P.O.R.

Rediscovery of Distortion Pedals

If you've read my posts from late last year you'd know that I was working on converting my old tin shed into a studio & workshop.

Now I wasn't exactly flush with cash for this project and had to make do with what I had available to me. My studio is divided into two parts. 

A gear room and a recording booth.

The booth works fairly well. Nobody can hear my dodgy acoustic guitar playing or my lousy singing outside of the shed.

Even playing electric guitar I can get a decent tone to "tape" for clean sounds. But the problem I have is that if I want distortion from the output tubes (my favourite kind) I can only really do that during the day, even with my 5 watt amps.

I know for a fact that it can't be heard in my own home, which is just about the same distance as my closest neighbours to the recording room. So in theory I could play as loud as I want inside with the gear that I have, but I just don't feel comfortable with it.

The obvious thing to do of course, was use distortion pedals and turn the volume down. Sure, its obvious now, but I didn't even consider it until now.

I have several distortions and fuzzes, but I think maybe that I was a little prejudiced toward achieving my favourite tone.

So last night I had a hankering for a wee bit of grit and decided to fire up my pedal board.

I stuck to overdrive types for this session.

The ones that I had on hand are as follows:

• Digitech Bad Monkey
• Tech 21 Sansamp GT2
• Boss Combo Drive

The Bad Monkey has been in my collection from way back.

Its a nice simple pedal that is kind of a Tube Screamer clone.

The results were pleasant and ranged between a little grit to nice full overdrive, which is great for chunking out the power chords.

The Sansamp is one that I had never used with a guitar amp(only direct). I know, ridiculous right?

It was excellent.

Each setting was really usable and not at all fizzy.

Lots of versatility and had a great gentle overdrive, but was not quite the death metal machine that I thought it would be on the high gain settings. Not that it really matters. I haven't played that sort of stuff since 1996.

The Combo Drive is really quite effective at generating Vox-like tones and as I've stated in an earlier article, goes from clean to seriously metal. Its a great little pedal for those looking for a tone change, without the massive investment. They're quite cheap at the moment too.

I felt like a kid in a toy store. Rediscovering distortion was something that I needed to do. Hopefully I'll actually be proactive with making music.