
Photo 1 Two versions of an extremely simple so-called bass-extender.
Esoterica Electrica columnist and luthier Jol Dantzig has been exploring string-tension myths in recent Premier Guitar articles. Here are some thoughts to add to the discourse.
Dear Jol Dantzig,
Your recent PG articles, "The Doors of Perception" and the follow-up "The String-Tension Follies Experiment, Continued," are an interesting read about string tension, a topic of which your friend Collin Olson of D'Addario said: "There's definitely a lot of confusion out there." He's right, and you're definitely not alone with your doubts, thoughts, and struggles.
Recently a bass builder came up with the idea of how to make a 30" short-scale feel and sound like a 34" long-scale bass. He intended to use a string-through bridge and attach the tailpiece at a place where Floyd-Rose-equipped guitars have those spring-claws to elongate string length. He was about to spend a lot of money on a patent, which he now hopefully saves for something else.
I've discussed this topic in a few earlier columns, but sometimes we might be skeptical about a certain idea and need a different explanation and view angle before we know what's wrong. And since this is even discussed among experienced luthiers, I wanted to shed some light on it.
You mentioned four questions you've been thinking about, and I allow myself to start with my short answers:
1. Does overall string length affect tension?
No.
2. Does string tension really affect tone?
No and yes.
3. Is sustain hampered by pickup magnets?
Yes.
4. Can Eric Johnson tell when my battery is alkaline?
Surely not, but he's free to believe whatever he wants.
With questions #3 and #4 being a very different topic, let's focus on questions #1 and #2.
The issue of string tension has a mathematical answer. This is the formula for a string's tension (T):
Uw= specific weight per length unit of core and winding, L= scale length, f= frequency.
I'm sure you've seen this, but let's put it in words: For a given speaking length of a specific string, tension equals frequency, or the root thereof.
And, less mathematical, if I said that length behind the bridge would add tension, you'd need to tune down to a lesser tension to get back to pitch "f." A classic circulus vitiosus.
Tension (if one-dimensional) is an axial force between two points and is in equilibrium across the whole length of the string between both anchor points, wherever these are. But pitch only depends on its speaking length.
I've discussed this topic in a few earlier columns, but sometimes we might be skeptical about a certain idea and need a different explanation and view angle before we know what's wrong.
Question #2 is a bit more complicated because I think the question should be: Does overall string length affect tone? While tension doesn't affect tone, overall string length can. It's often said that additional string length adds especially to the low end, which once led to the idea of so-called bass-extenders (see "The B-String Extender Myth" [March 2013]).
Two of these "bass-extender" constructions are shown in Photo 1, which to me is not only simple, but debunking at the same time. In physics, it's often helpful to look at the extremes. Assuming adding length worked:
A.) It would be almost impossible to build a good-sounding headless bass, as these sport an extremely short overall string-length.
B.) Using an extra, extra-long string, wound all across the room, would allow one to forever dominate the bass world.
Both outcomes not only sound very unlikely but have been disproven. It's no surprise that you mention two specific instruments that led to the idea of outer string length affecting tension: the upright bass and an archtop guitar or bass.
Photo 2 - This German Fasan archtop bass (built in 1965) has a shallow break angle and long string-length on the left side of the bridge.
Photo courtesy of german-vintage-guitar.com
Both of these are known for their extended string length behind the bridge, sport a separate bridge and tailpiece, and, more importantly, are half or fully acoustic instruments. On an acoustic instrument, you'll want to remove as much weight and stress from the soundboard. The first eases movement of the top, while the latter allows for an even thinner soundboard, moving even more air.
This construction with a very distant bridge and tailpiece is exactly the one where perception chimes in, although I'd prefer to use the term elasticity. Whenever we pluck or bend a string, we apply a force (F) to a given string with an elasticity (E) and diameter (A). According to Hooke's law for a material's elastic behavior:
E and A are constant and so would be the force that needs to be applied for bending a string by ∂l. For a given instrument, l0 is constant—close to the scale length for a headless, and scale length plus the additional length outside the scale, if the string can slip over the bridge once we bend it. When l0 getting bigger, the force needed for the same bend gets smaller and this results in the perception of a softer, more elastic string. Of course, the break angle at both ends of the scale length needs to be rather shallow with low friction to allow for the string's slippage (Photo 2). It's discussed in my PG column "The Break Dance Behind the Bridge" [February 2021].
A final answer to your question about its effect on tone is pretty complex and one I'm also still struggling with. A few of my thoughts on the subject went into the article "Bridge vs. Tone" [March 2021].
Maybe these can give you some ideas to chew on?
Sincerely,
Heiko PG
The range of clean, dirty, and complex tones available from this high-quality, carefully crafted Dumble modeler make it a formidable studio and performance device.
Fantastic variation in many delicious sounds makes it a bargain. High-quality. Easy to use and customize. Killer studio path to lively, responsive guitar sounds.
Price may be hard for some to swallow if they don’t leverage the whole of its potential.
$399
UAFX Enigmatic ’82 Overdrive Special
uaudio.com
I’ve never played a realDumble. I’d venture most of us haven’t. But given my experiences with James Santiago’s UAFX modeling pedals, most recently theUAFX Lion, I plugged in the new Dumble-inspired UAFX Enigmatic confident I’d taste at least the essence of that very rare elixir. You could argue there is no definitive Dumble sound. Each was customized to some extent for the customer, and they are renowned nearly as much for dynamic responsiveness and flexibility as their singing, complex, clean-to-dirty palettes.
The Enigmatic nails the flexibility, for sure. To my ears, its tone foundation lives somewhere on a sliver of Venn diagram where a black-panel Fender and a 50-watt Hiwatt intersect. It’s alive, dimensional, snappy, sparkly, massive, and, at the right EQ settings, hot and excitable. But the Enigmatic’s powerful EQ and gain controls, multiple virtual cab and mic pairings, rock, jazz, and custom voices, plus additional deep, bright, and presence controls enable you to travel many leagues from that fundamental tone. The customization work you can do in the app enables significant changes in the Enigmatic’s tone profile and responsiveness, too. All these observations are made tracking the Enigmatic straight to a DAW—making the breadth of its personality even more impressive. But the Enigmatic sounds every bit as lively at the front end of an amp, and black-panel Fenders are a primo pairing for its saturation and sparkly attributes. The Enigmatic is nearly $400, which is an investment. But considering the ground I covered in just a few days with it, and the quality and variety of sounds I could conjure with the unit just sitting on my desk, the performance-to-price ratio struck me as very favorable indeed.
This month’s mod Dan’s uses a 500k linear pot, a 1.5H inductor (L) with a 0.039 µF (39nF) cap (C), and a 220k resistor (R) in parallel.
This simple passive mod will boost your guitar’s sweet-spot tones.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this column, we’ll be taking a closer look at the “mid boost and scoop mod” for electric guitars from longtime California-based tech Dan Torres, whose Torres Engineering seems to be closed, at least on the internet. This mod is in the same family with the Gibson Varitone, Bill Lawrence’s Q-Filter, the Gresco Tone Qube (said to be used by SRV), John “Dawk” Stillwells’ MTC (used by Ritchie Blackmore), the Yamaha Focus Switch, and the Epiphone Tone Expressor, as well as many others. So, while it’s just one of the many variations of tone-shaping mods, I chose the Torres because this one sounds best to me, which simply has to do with the part values he chose.
Don’t let the name fool you, this is a purely passive device—nothing is going to be boosted. In general, you can’t increase anything with passive electronics that isn’t already there. Period. But you can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent (so … “boost” in guitar marketing language). Removing highs makes lows more apparent, and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which create the magnetic field in a guitar circuit) and capacitors will create resonant peaks and valleys (bandpasses and notches), further coloring the overall tone. This type of bandpass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked, and it all works at unity gain.
“You can’t increase anything with passive electronics that isn’t already there … but you can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent.”
All the systems I mentioned above are doing more or less the same thing, using different approaches and slightly different component values. They are all meant to be updated tone controls. Our common tone circuit is usually a variable low-pass filter (aka treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through, while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap. Most of these systems are LCR networks, which means that there is not only a capacitor (C), like on our standard tone controls, but also an inductor (L) and a resistor (R).
In general, all these systems are meant to control the midrange in order to scoop the mids, creating a mid-cut. This can be a cool sounding option, e.g. on a Strat for that mid-scooped neck and middle tone.
Dan Torres offered his “midrange kit” via an internet shop that is no longer online, same with his business website. The Torres design is a typical LCR network and looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Dan’s design uses a 500k linear pot, a 1.5H inductor (L) with a 0.039 µF (39nF) cap (C), and a 220k resistor (R) in parallel. Let’s break down the parts piece by piece:
Any 500k linear pot will do the trick, in one of the rare scenarios where a linear pot works better in a passive guitar system than an audio pot.
(C) 0.039µF cap: This is kind of an odd value. Keeping production tolerances of up to 20 percent in mind, any value that is close will do, so you can use any small cap you want for this. I would prefer a small metallized film cap, and any voltage rating will do. If you want to stay as close as possible to the original design, use any 0.039 µF low-tolerance film cap.
(L) 1.5H inductor: The original design uses a Xicon 42TL021 inductor, which is easy to find and fairly priced. This one is also used in the Bill Lawrence Q-Filter design, the Gibson standard Varitone, and many other systems like this. It’s very small, so it will fit in virtually every electronic compartment of a guitar. It has a frequency range of 300 Hz up to 3.4 kHz, with a primary impedance of 4k ohms (that’s the one we want to use) and a secondary impedance of 600 ohms. Snip off the three secondary leads and the center tap of the primary side and use the two remaining outer primary leads; the primary side is marked with a “P.” On the pic, you can see the two leads you need marked in red, all other leads can be snipped off. You can connect the two remaining leads to the pot either way; it doesn’t matter which of them is going to ground when using it this way.
Drawing courtesy of singlecoil.com
(R) 220k: use a small axial metal film resistor (0.25 W), which is easy to find and is the quasi-standard.
Other designs use slightly different part values—the Bill Lawrence Q-filter has a 1.8H L, 0.02 µF C and 8k R, while the old RA Gresco Tone Qube from the ’80s has a 1.5H L, 0.0033 µF C, and a 180k R, so this is a wide field for experimentation to tweak it for your personal tone.
This mid-cut system can be put into any electric guitar not only as a master tone, but also together with a regular tone control or something like the Fender Greasebucket, or it can be assigned only to a certain pickup. It can be a great way to enhance your sonic palette, so give it a try.
That’s it! Next month, we’ll take a deeper look into how to fight feedback on a Telecaster. It’s a common issue, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
The two-in-one “sonic refractor” takes tremolo and wavefolding to radical new depths.
Pros: Huge range of usable sounds. Delicious distortion tones. Broadens your conception of what guitar can be.
Build quirks will turn some users off.
$279
Cosmodio Gravity Well
cosmod.io
Know what a wavefolder does to your guitar signal? If you don’t, that’s okay. I didn’t either until I started messing around with the all-analog Cosmodio Instruments Gravity Well. It’s a dual-effect pedal with a tremolo and wavefolder, the latter more widely used in synthesis that , at a certain threshold, shifts or inverts the direction the wave is traveling—in essence, folding it upon itself. Used together here, they make up what Cosmodio calls a sonic refractor.
Two Plus One
Gravity Well’s design and control set make it a charm to use. Two footswitches engage tremolo and wavefolder independently, and one of three toggle switches swaps the order of the effects. The two 3-way switches toggle different tone and voice options, from darker and thicker to brighter and more aggressive. (Mixing and matching with these two toggles yields great results.)
The wavefolder, which has an all-analog signal path bit a digitally controlled LFO, is controlled by knobs for both gain and volume, which provide enormous dynamic range. The LFO tremolo gets three knobs: speed, depth, and waveform. The first two are self-explanatory, but the latter offers switching between eight different tremolo waveforms. You’ll find standard sawtooth, triangle, square, and sine waves, but Cosmodio also included some wacko shapes: asymmetric swoop, ramp, sample and hold, and random. These weirder forms force truly weird relationships with the pedal, forcing your playing into increasingly unpredictable and bizarre territories.
This is all housed in a trippy, beautifully decorated Hammond 1590BB-sized enclosure, with in/out, expression pedal, and power jacks. I had concerns about the durability of the expression jack because it’s not sealed to its opening with an outer nut and washer, making it feel more susceptible to damage if a cable gets stepped on or jostled near the connection, as well as from moisture. After a look at the interior, though, the build seems sturdy as any I’ve seen.
Splatterhouse Audio
Cosmodio’s claim that the refractor is a “first-of-its-kind” modulation effect is pretty grand, but they have a point in that the wavefolder is rare-ish in the guitar domain and pairing it with tremolo creates some pretty foreign sounds. Barton McGuire, the Massachusetts-based builder behind Cosmodio, released a few videos that demonstrate, visually, how a wavefolder impacts your guitar’s signal—I highly suggest checking them out to understand some of the principles behind the effect (and to see an ’80s Muppet Babies-branded keyboard in action.)
By folding a waveform back on itself, rather than clipping it as a conventional distortion would, the wavefolder section produces colliding, reflecting overtones and harmonics. The resulting distortion is unique: It can sound lo-fi and broken in the low- to mid-gain range, or synthy and extraterrestrial when the gain is dimed. Add in the tremolo, and you’ve got a lot of sonic variables to play with.
Used independently, the tremolo effect is great, but the wavefolder is where the real fun is. With the gain at 12 o’clock, it mimics a vintage 1x10 tube amp cranked to the breaking point by a splatty germanium OD. A soft touch cleans up the signal really nicely, while maintaining the weirdness the wavefolder imparts to its signal. With forceful pick strokes at high gain, it functions like a unique fuzz-distortion hybrid with bizarre alien artifacts punching through the synthy goop.
One forum commenter suggested that the Gravity Well effect is often in charge as much the guitar itself, and that’s spot on at the pedal's extremes. Whatever you expect from your usual playing techniques tends to go out the window —generating instead crumbling, sputtering bursts of blubbering sound. Learning to respond to the pedal in these environments can redefine the guitar as an instrument, and that’s a big part of Gravity Well’s magic.
The Verdict
Gravity Well is the most fun I’ve had with a modulation pedal in a while. It strikes a brilliant balance between adventurous and useful, with a broad range of LFO modulations and a totally excellent oddball distortion. The combination of the two effects yields some of the coolest sounds I’ve heard from an electric guitar, and at $279, it’s a very reasonably priced journey to deeply inspiring corners you probably never expected your 6-string (or bass, or drums, or Muppet Babies Casio EP-10) to lead you to.
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