Messages

How do you feel about a 'V' neck profile? Some of the Recording King guitars have such.
I have a vague recollection the Tanglewood neck has a similar profile, but haven't played one for a while. It is also a shorter scale.

The Stanford probably has a very similar neck profile to a Furch/Stonebridge, which in turn is similar to a Taylor and not fat.

Every Ibanez I have played has had quite a wide nut and very thin neck.

The Loar guitars are trying to replicate early Gibsons, which tended to have baseball bats. I would try to find one of these.

>Make sense?
Yes.

But the design, if I have looked at the correct schematic (perhaps you could clarify?), does not lend itself to an easy mod to add a clean blend. You will need to add an input buffer and you will probably also want an output mixer, so it may be easier to go with a second board of known design.

Theremin.

You can do this with an on-on-on DPDT toggle switch or various flavours of rotary switch.
Depending on how big the amp is (5W?), you will likely need a heavy duty switch. I have never seen a heavy duty on-on-on toggle switch, so you may not have much choice.

Edit: 5W into 8R is a little less than 1A.
Apparently a modestly sized toggle switch is happy with 5A, so I would use something like this:
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/toggle-switches/7109876/

Cool.
Are you using G or D tuning?
If your left hand is getting tired, you might want to audition a few different steels. I find this one to be quite comfortable as you have a bit more meat to hold onto:
http://www.shubb.com/gs/

>I agree, it will be a while before all the through hole stuff goes obsolete, at least for pedals.

I think a distinction here has to be made between a product at 'end of life' or (technically) 'obsolete' vs. a product that is no longer attainable.
Most through hole semiconductors are EOL, or will be in the not-too-distant future. Quite a few passive through hole stuff (caps, resistors, etc) is starting to go EOL too.
However, that doesn't mean that many of them will soon be unobtainable. We still by NOS 50 year-old transistors after all.

>I was curious what the creative minds out there were doing about this?  Are you sitting on hoards of parts? Paying out the nose? Going to SMT?  Experimenting with comparable substitutes?

Personally (although the creative mind bit may be debatable) - Yes to some extent, sometimes, sometimes, absolutely.

The clipping is done with a variation of a 'rubber diode' circuit:

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scots_Guide/audio/part2/page3.html
https://www.google.com/patents/US20090231011

This gives soft-ish clipping, and more interestingly allows the clipping threshold to be varied. As a result, it crops up a lot in solid state amps to prevent hard clipping of the power amp stage.

I have built some variants with the rubber diode driven from within an op-amp feedback loop (like in the patent ^), where it works nicely enough.
Is it better than just using diodes? I'm not sure.

^indeed. Dropbox have fallen a long way down my list of esteem as a result.

Bengt - Thanks, that's great news about the 'raw=1' option.

>Does this help in anyway?
https://www.lonniewest.com/2017/02/dropboxsharedurl/

Thanks. That's helpful (will start using 'raw=1'), but still doesn't seem to allow one to embed a dropbox picture directly into a forum post.

How about a passive tone control with a rotary switch to select different caps?
You could add a transformer as an inductor to go down the Varitone route if you wanted to get fancy.

>I've been using this for years to share all my layouts and schematics.

I'm in the same boat. While it will allow some degree of revisionist history, I don't like that all these threads will have a lot more empty space in them now.

^
FET input op-amps (much better for high input impedance) came along in the mid-late '70s and would have been relatively expensive, so the cost argument makes some sense.
BJTs are also more tolerant of input abuse (e.g. through ESD) and as Cornish was making kit for touring musicians, he may have figured they were more likely to survive a tour of stadium rock. This is actually still a valid reason to choose a BJT as the input buffer to your pedal board.

As for Cornish, it looks to me like a simple BJT buffer (off the datasheet) but with the input impedance adjusted downward and some RC filtering going on at the output. Definitely not a "clean" buffer that seeks reproduce the input precisely. And that's probably why some people like it. The filtering/impedance adjust part is that makes it sound different, and I kinda doubt he copied that out of a textbook, since most books try to avoid signal degradation...

Nope. The cap from the emitter to the bias resistor (C3) is there for bootstrapping and increases the input impedance. With a BJT with mid-high gain, you can get >1 M input impedance, which is as good as essentially all op-amp designs commonly used. The filtering is designed to be flat too.
It's a good design, and I very much doubt I could tell the difference between it and an op-amp buffer in a blind listening test...
Which leads me to my answer to the OP - use whatever you have handy as you probably can't tell the difference.

I haven't heard of anybody cloning these - would be quite a lot of work, for a very limited pool of buyers.
Small Bear's markups are justifiably significantly more than most web stores, so I wouldn't take the price difference as evidence for anything sinister.

Also note that Accutronics recently changed the casing of some/all of the BTDR bricks, so if it looks different than expected, don't panic.

p.s. I wouldn't buy the BTDR-2 as the newer BTDR-3 is a significant improvement.

http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/potsecrets/potscret.htm