Building Your Own Guitar Pickup From Scrap

Pickups are a key part of an electric guitar’s sound. You can spend a king’s ransom on tracking down just the right Vintage American Original 1950s Whatevers (TM) to put in your Spudocaster, but it’s not the only way. [Keith Decent] decided to make a pickup from scratch, using only …read more

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Talk Like A Game Boy, Sting Like a Beep

Have you ever listened to a song and wondered how they created the robotic-sounding vocals? There’s a huge variety of ways to do so. [scythe1005] decided to take their inspiration from rock history, creating a Game Boy powered talkbox (Japanese, Google Translate recommended for those that don’t speak the language).

Human speech is generated when vibrations from the vocal chords are shaped into intelligible sounds by the motion of the mouth, tongue, and other body parts known as “articulators”. A talkbox creates robotic speech sounds by using the articulators while replacing the vibrations from the vocal chords with alternative source. …read more

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Rocking An Acoustic Guitar By Making It Electric

Brothers [Armand] and [Victor] took their acoustic guitar to the next level, making their own pickups to turn it into an electric guitar. The result is that awesome electric guitar sound.

The pickups are homemade magnetic pickups. Each string has a steel bolt behind it with three ceramic magnets on each bolt. A coil is also wrapped around all the pickups. That coil is what’s connected to the wires going to the amplifier. When a string vibrates, it changes the magnetic field in the pickup which induces a current in the coil and that is then sent on to the …read more

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