guitar wiring tutorial
guitar killswitch help?
I would like to build a killswitch for my electric guitar. I thought about building one into my guitar but I decided against it.
I found this tutorial for building a ‘pedal’ killswitch:
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/sho…
It looks to me like it is shorting the guitar signal…Last time I checked shorting out electronics was bad and screwed stuff up…so why do you short out the guitar signal here? Maybe there’s something I’m missing here…is this shorting of the wires bad or not for my guitar and amp? Also, this won’t give me the ‘cable came unplugged from the guitar’ sound will it?
Thanks for any help
~sam
When we are talking about anything that has to do with power like an AC line or any such item than yes shorting it can be disasterous and even deadly! But when we are referring to an audio signal such as the kind from your guitars pickups then there is no voltage present so no harm can be done to you or your equipment.
In a way, every guitar has a killswitch. The volume control is exactly that, a way to “kill” the signal to the amp. A killswitch works on the same principal of shorting the positive signal to ground. With a volume control you are simply adjusting the amount of signal that you are shorting to ground. The more you decrease the volume the more signal is being diverted to the ground.
If you have a Les Paul style guitar you can use the toggle switch as a kill switch. Simply turn down one of the pickups all the way and use the toggle switch to move between the pickups. Since one is up and the other is down you will hear the familiar “killswitch” effect. This only works on guitars that have a separate volume control for each pickup.
Heaters Wiring Part 2
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