Official Luthiers Forum!

Other than winding pickups? Upon reading about the versatility of these switches, about a million ideas flew through my head about guitar wiring.

First of all it seems, if you're clever, you can design your own switches to do whatever the heck you want them to. Second, it looks promising for some really outside of the box stuff.

What if you had a sort of "floating" switch on the guitar that's just a magnet that you can move around to different positions, so the top would actually have no holes in it, just spots where you move the magnet around for different sounds.

I also thought of putting a skateboard wheel or something smaller with a magnet embedded that would strike a killswitch. That would be kinda fun. It would be a weird looking guitar of course.


Anybody know of guitars that have utilized reed switches?

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http://www.tinyhouseandland.com

There are strip sensors that sense the position of a magnet in a tube that might do something like that too.
Or the hall effect sensor that has no moving parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_effect_sensor

Halls are cheap, too.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

I have a lot of experience with reed switches, coming from an engineering and automation background. They're finicky and the last thing I would want to be screwing with on stage. Most guys that I deal want less knobs and finicky things, not more. Believe it or not, I actually yanked a knob off a guitar I built and turned it into a one tone knob configuration instead of two knobs (one for each pickup), requested by the player.

I guess it depends on your audience. The real pros I know want to have a handful of really usable and good tones:

1) bridge gain
2) neck gain
3) neck clean
4) something twangy
5) something clean that cuts but isn't harsh when it starts getting loud

and that's pretty much it. Anything more complex than that has most pros fumbling on stage and they find it annoying. That's just my opinion from studying how real pros play. They want to pull a knob, flip one switch, or something similarly simple to get a usable tone, and then they forget about it and concentrate on playing. When they have to do more fiddling and twisting and switching than just that, I've noticed that they're visibly annoyed and distracted.

Anyhow, nothing against reed switches but just giving my observations of what I've seen and personally what I like for myself.

Nice to know that they're finicky. I was wondering if they would be.

I think that would classify most professional guitarists but certainly not all. My favorite musicians are ones that are innovative and play unique music, not a set list of the crap I hear playing in grocery stores. Honestly I don't want to make guitars for those people.

I wouldn't mind building for jazz guitarists though.

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http://www.tinyhouseandland.com

Didn't mean to sound harsh by the way, that was just the first thing that came to mind after what you described. I'm sure I'm in a minority here but I do not like classic rock, at least not the 90% of it I hear involuntarily, like ACDC type stuff. I think it's actually going to be extremely important for me to make instruments primarily for people whose music I like.

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http://www.tinyhouseandland.com