Comments on: Some new noise makers from OSM laboratories

By: Davo

Davo — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:54:36 +0000

I really enjoyed reading this page. I too am into prepared guitar-and you certainly have some interesting sounds and techniques here.

Recently Ive been using high gain to modify tones, as well as radio/magnetic interference. TV remotes and cell phones can give intresting sounds as well.

Thanks for the read!

By: abandonview

abandonview — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:24:02 +0000

i had one of these record players as a child… so nice to hear the sound again.

By: James T. Hawes, AA9DT

James T. Hawes, AA9DT — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:12:54 +0000

Fascinating page. Incidentally, you don’t have to salvage ferrite bars from radios. Amidon Associates sells both the bars and the magnet wire. For decades, radio amateurs have ordered ferrite materials from Amidon.

For your electronic music and detection experiments, Amidon Material 33 seems right. This material seems to be the lowest-frequency ferrite formula. (There are different types, you know.)

See this page…
http://www.amidoncorp.com/aai_ferritecores.htm

If you need more volume from a pickup, you might try an amplifier from one of my pages. See…
http://www.hawestv.com. This page includes an “Amplifiers & Calculators” drop-down menu. From this menu, you can select amplifier calculators that design custom, one-transistor preamplifiers. You can use more than one transistor, but only one should do the job. Power it with a nine-volt battery.

I’ve also just added pages on a JFET preamplifier. JFETs are vastly more sensitive than normal (“BJ”) transistors are. JFETs are also a bit cranky. You must take special care when building circuits with them. For example, severe device variation within a type makes behavior difficult to predict. Typically, to arrive at proper performance, you must “cut and try” source resistors. Even with textbook designs, this statement tends to be true. Also, extreme sensitivity has its downside: Static electricity can instantly destroy a JFET.

BJ (bipolar junction) transistors tend to be somewhat forgiving to beginners. They’re inexpensive, and behave more uniformly than JFETs do. BJ transistors can also develop much more gain than JFETs can.

By: Ben.H

Ben.H — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 22:39:20 +0000

Found it! Yeah, there are some interesting things you can do with pick-ups, and ferrite bars could be a productive substitute.

By: howsthatsound

howsthatsound — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:32:06 +0000

oh nice! that sounds great. i have also tried my had at pickup winding on my cigar box guitar. what pain in the ass, but pretty rewarding i’d say. i have actually been meaning to order some magnet wire to make some more pickups, but i may try just using ferrite bars. if that works out okay, it’s like 2 dollar pickups for life.

thanks for reading!

By: Ben.H

Ben.H — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:49:57 +0000

These are great instruments! It’s good that we can hear them too.

You’ve reminded me of a friend who made a plank guitar using home-made pickups with some magnets and copper wire, not bothering to count how many times he wound the magnets, then stuck a speaker powered by a 9 volt battery at the end of the plank. That was a truly evil-sounding instrument.

By: howsthatsound

howsthatsound — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 04:11:50 +0000

as far as age is concerned, i’m not sure. but i think they are probably in just about any radio you’d find in a thrift store. in fact i don’t think i have ever seen a radio without one.
I have seen some with up to 4 wires. what i did was connect a loose 1/4 jack to an amplifier and use aligator clips to make connections between the wires from the ferrite bar and the jack. a mono jack has 2 connections. in this case all that matters is that you connect both to separate wires and that it produces the desired effect of amplifying motor sounds. i tested mine using a drill. i found that one set of connections would pick up, but not very loud, but another would be very loud. obviously the more volume the better.
once you find the connections that work best, you can either permanently wire the jack to the bar, or do as i did and connect a length of cable to a 1/4 plug. either way will work, but i happen to like the cable method if you happen to have light weight cable and a loose plug around. if you wire the jack directly, i’d still use a short length of wire between the bar and the jack.
once you connect everything, and test again that it indeed works, wrap the ferrite bar well with electrical tape, being sure to wrap a length up the wire that goes to the jack. this will both insulate and relieve strain from the wieght of the jack and cable. then coat the bar in plasti-dip following the given instructions. be sure to cover it an inch or so past the electrical tape on the wire side, just to reinforce it a bit more.
if you used a jack on the end instead of a plug, you can wrap and dip the jack as well, but care has to be taken to insure that it is not too tight to insert a plug, and that you keep plasti-dip from entering and ruining the jack.
hope that helps. let me know if you need any more info. and if you make one of these, let me know, i’d love to hear what you do with it.

-et-

By: startlingmoniker

startlingmoniker — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 02:44:09 +0000

Yeah, I’m definitely going to have to ask for instructions on the ferrite bar pickup-thingie… how is it wired? how old of a radio are we talking here? is it already wrapped in wire? what do you mean by “tapped out”? and how does the bar have connections? I’m really sort of dense, electronically speaking… but wow! that sounds fantastic!!