Custom Electric Guitar

This project is an exploration of electronic component selection and of how their combinations influence a physical manifestation of electronics, sound. Single coil pickups are brighter and noisier than double coils (Humbuckers) that have two coils wired in opposite polarity to cancel noise out, thus single coils are more in need of shielding like Faraday cage to reduce Radio Frequency (RF) interference and 60-cycle hum. The tone knob in an electric guitar (chose a Stratocaster shape) involves a Low-Pass Filter (LPF) circuit whose cut-off frequency can be computed using 1/(2πRC), so lower capacitor and resistor values tend to yield a brighter tone (chose 0.022μF and A500K Ω). 'A' pertains to Logarithmic taper that matches human hearing while 'B' is for Linear taper. As lowering the volume knob causes an increase in impedance causing loss of high frequencies, a Duncan treble bleed circuit that consists a capacitor and a resistor in parallel, creating a High-Pass Filter (HPF), is used. Different switches are utilized such as push-pull pots and 3-way Double-Throw-Double-Pole (DPDT) on/on/on switches to achieve different pickup combinations and to split the two coils of the Dual Rail pickup, resulting to 27 unique tonal possibilities. Due to financial constraints, the project has not yet been completed physically, but was reviewed by a guitar luthier, Mr. Zip Zoolander.