Has Anyone Ever Made

[ggunn]

An electric guitar with no controls?

Think of all the wood that'd have

My Les Paul (or as we used to called them back in south Louisiana, my Lester Pousson) used to be that way. I had started a project to make it active, but it stalled out after I had gutted the cavity. I needed it for a gig, so I cut the end off a guitar cord, shoved the cut end in through the output jack hole, tied a knot in it to keep it from pulling back through, and soldered the wires coming from the pickup selector switch to the end of the cable. It stayed that way for a couple of years.

I never finished the project; eventually I restored my LP to more or less its original config.

 

[juststartingout]

An electric guitar with no controls?

Think of all the wood that'd have

Well, I actually went the other way. I put a 6 pos switch in, and 4 push-pull tone and volume. I have way lots of options as far as tone goes. While you might have more wood, I would rather have more control over tone.

http://home.comcast.net/~bonrox/guitars/Callie.htm

It's an electric guitar. It's all about getting a given tone out. If you want wood, get an accoustic and a mic.

Just my opinion, so please take it for that!!

 

[Mark7]

I like it

 

[juststartingout]

You know, you could use some roller pots instead of knob type. You could mount them on the bottom edge, then you could have all wood on top with no knobs. They would be barely noticable and you would still have standard controls.

 

[Light]

Guitar amps have come along way since Leo built the first Strat.

Maybe, but they sure haven't gotten any better.



Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

 

[ibanezrocks]

The only benefit of not having a volume knob would be that you wouldn't get treble bleed through the pot. However if that was really an issue and you tele' folk want to make your guitars so bright that they make your ears bleed you could always just use a higher resistance pot. Guitar makes commonly use different pot values to get this desired effect, a guitar with humbuckers typically uses 500k (I think I read that some new Gibsons use 300k depending on the pickups) pots so that theres some but not too much treble loss, where as a guitar with single coils use 250k so theres more treble bleeding through since single coils are brighter than humbuckers. One should perhaps experiment with this before bypassing completely by trying a 1 meg ohm pot, however there's a reason no one that I've ever heard of uses this value of pots or higher: Most people find it too bright.

I might be able to get along with a guitar without a tone control, as that should brighten up the guitar significantly getting the capacitor out of the circuit but I fail to see the benefit of bypassing the volume control and I thought I'd share that before any of our forum members ran off and bypassed their volume knobs.

 

[timthetortoise]

1 meg isn't a complete bypass. It is 1 meg for a reason. However, there are true bypass pots that, when you set them to wide open, are really wide open. Forgot where to find them but they tend to cost a pretty penny.

 

[ibanezrocks]

1 meg isn't a complete bypass. It is 1 meg for a reason. However, there are true bypass pots that, when you set them to wide open, are really wide open. Forgot where to find them but they tend to cost a pretty penny.

I wasn't saying that 1 meg is a bypass, I'm saying its going to be brighter than a 500 k pot, but since most people find 1 meg too bright, therefore a full bypass would definitely be too bright for most people. That was my point.

 

[punkin]

There is such a thing, you know. The EVH Wolfgang.

A guitar with no tone knob, I mean.

THANK YOU! Proud owner of two of these beasts and you know, I don't miss the tone knob not one bit

 

[Light]

I wasn't saying that 1 meg is a bypass, I'm saying its going to be brighter than a 500 k pot, but since most people find 1 meg too bright, therefore a full bypass would definitely be too bright for most people. That was my point.

AH, but MANY people use 1 meg pots, particularly tele guys. Huge numbers of country tele guys use 1 meg pots. We do that mod fairly often.



Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

 

[Light]

However, there are true bypass pots that, when you set them to wide open, are really wide open. Forgot where to find them but they tend to cost a pretty penny.

True, but they don't work as volume pots, they only work as tone pots. The way they work is that they have a gap in the track right before the wipper reaches the pad for one of the terminals. Unfortunatly, this means they don't work for a volume control because the volume works as a function of the difference of the resistance to from the input to the wipper and the wipper to ground (it is called a voltage divider, if you care). If you were to use a No-Load Pot (at least, that is what Fender calls them) for a volume control, as soon as you turned it down, you would disconect the wipper from the input. It's too bad, really, but what can you do.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi