do it yourself

DIY: How to String a Classical Guitar

Tips and tools you need to change strings on a classical guitar.

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Long to try your hand at building a pedal but can't help feeling overwhelmed? Let us enlighten you on the tools, materials, and available resources, as well as teach you how to build a critical, oft-overlooked testing device.

The DIY guitar-pedal world has been exploding over the past few years—so much so that it's likely at least a few of you have dipped a toe in already. I know I did. After using pedals for so many years and becoming pretty much obsessed with them, I felt a burning desire to learn what's going on inside these contraptions. But initially I was pretty intimidated. There is so much to learn! And even though we live in an age when all the information we need is practically at our fingertips, it's sometimes difficult to know how to word things in a search engine to get what we're looking for. Luckily, there's an immense DIY community out there, too—blogs, forums, and general-information reference sites. In my experience, just about everyone in the community is eager to help each other, so it didn't take long for me to feel welcome and encouraged.

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Fig. A

When power cables and signal paths tangle, the results can be noisy. Here are some easy fixes.

In my previous State of the Stomp ["The Shocking Truth About Ground Loops," October 2021], I discussed how ground loops can be formed between the amplifiers in a multiple amp setup, and how to safely address them with an isolation transformer. As a brief reminder, a ground loop is created whenever two electrical circuits that theoretically have the same ground potential actually have a non-zero potential between them in practice, and that often results in hums and buzzes that are harmonically related to the mains voltage frequency in your part of the world.

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