Multipurpose Guitar Preamp (With a TL071 Op-amp)

I would like to show you the diagram of a simple guitar preamp unit. It's based only on eight parts (including TL071 op-amp).

The preamp is very flexible in use. Can be mounted in a guitar body - as an on-board preamp or as a part of a guitar effect pedal. It's got low power consumption - perfect stuff for work with a battery.

The preamp is based on a very popular circuit, but with this diagram you will get the clear „how to” that you can easily use in your work with guitar electronics.

Michael Wilton and Chris DeGarmo from Queensrÿche - The Guitar Tone Legends

Another great guitar duo. Michael Wilton and Chris DeGarmo made an awsome job in the Queensrÿche band. I like Especially the Operation: Mindcrime album. In one song they can show you shredding, cool melodic lines, progressive riffs and many more.

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.

Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir - The Guitar Tone Legends

Jerry Garcia (1942 - 1995) and Bob Weir were the awesome guitar duo of the Grateful Dead band. The best thing, for me, that I can say about them, is that I don't know what they were exactly doing? Were they playing blues, jazz, folk, rock or what? They were doing just everything! Bob and Jerry were very flexible guitarists and they knew how to improvise.

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.