Semi-Active Guitar Wiring - Simple and Effective

Today I would like to present my guitar wiring project based on an active buffer. The wiring is connecting together: a common, passive tone control, and an active buffer with a volume potentiometer.

The target is to get an quite clean signal transport (more transparent tone), a clean working volume potentiometer (no treble losses), and a passive tone control – so there will always be the way to get some warmer tone, typical for passive guitar wirings.

The project can be done basically in every kind of an electric guitar. No matter what kind of pickups and wood it got.

Diagram:

Quite Simple Active Guitar Wiring - for Clean Signal Transport

Today I would like to present another guitar wiring diagram with the buffer, that I wrote about in some previous post.

It's very simple. The wiring is based on one potentiometer, one tone switch with two capacitors and the buffer. It's designed for those of you, who are looking for clean, linear guitar signal transport, with no uncontrolled affects from parts of the wiring. It will not give you a lot of on-board tone shaping functions, but will be perfect if you prefer to use pedals and amps equalizers for that purposes, or if you just wan't to hear more from the wood, strings and pickups, without big impact from potentionmeters and capacitors.

About Active Guitar Wirings - Preamps, Buffers, Pickups

I already have few post about active guitar wirings with on-board buffers, but I didn't wrote an article, about reasons of building that stuff and it's benefits. So, here it is.

Some people, who mounted an active wiring with an on-board buffer or a preamp, or have active pickups in their guitars, are saying that this stuff changing the tone dramatically and it's a little bit too bright or less full, smooth sounding. I think, that it comes from some kind of misunderstanding the way how this electronics works.

If you mounted an active wiring, with a completely linear frequency response (for example audio op-amp based), the tone should be much brighter. It's because of transporting a full frequency range. Passive guitar wirings usually cutting off a little bit of treble. Active wirings are usually - like I said before - linear. They will just transport a guitar pickup signal. Thy will not cut anything if you don't want it. It's because of preamp or buffer impedance – high on input, low on output – and characteristic of working with the signal.

Active Guitar Wiring - With a TL071 Based Buffer

In the previous post I wrote about building an on-board buffer. This time I would like to show you some guitar wiring with this thing. 

It's not very complicated. It's based on one buffer circuit,  three potentiometers: 2x volume, 1x tone and one tone capacitor - in quite untypical value range.

How to Make a Small On-Board Buffer?

Today, I would like to show you how to make a really small on-board guitar buffer.
It's based on the TL071 op-amp, which is very good for that purposes. It will allow you to make an active buffer with high impedance on the input (1M), and low impedance on the output (it's very important for buffers). The TL071 will not eat your power source too quick - will work hundreds of hours on one, typical 9V battery. 

It is a very popular construction in guitar electronics. Nothing original, but will work fine for the most of our purposes. You need only six parts to make it: the op-amp, two resistors, two capacitors (one film, one electrolytic) and some small multipurpose PCB.