[sdiy] Guitar levels (slightly OT)

[Tom Wiltshire]

+1 agree. Guitar levels are extremely variable. A few hundred millivolts up to 1Vpp is fairly typical, but several volts P-P is also common. And then there’s high output pickups and bass guitars too!

I got burned by this recently with my DigiDelay pedal project. This uses dsPIC for audio delay, and runs at 3.3V. Silly me thought 3.3V would be enough for guitar level, and *mostly* it is, but some people have had significant problems with overdriven inputs.

I would suspect that guitar amps can handle levels up to around 5 or 6Vpp without distortion. I know that it is possible to overdrive the inputs of a typical amp with a 9V stompbox (Tube screamer style…) and since they don’t use rail-to-rail amps, max output is only 7 or 8Vpp.

Tom

> On 3 Apr 2018, at 21:21, Donald Tillman <don at till.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 3, 2018, at 11:08 AM, sleepy_dog at gmx.de wrote:
>> 
>> So perhaps one would not be well advised to rely on guitar output levels definitely being as low as given by several people earlier in this thread.  Maybe those low levels are more typical, but not guaranteed, it seems.
> 
> Yah, there are some outlier pickups with crazy high output levels.  My Rickenbacker bass horseshoe bridge pickup can put out 8V p-p ("runs appliances, stuns small animals").  But that's not practical, it overdrives the crap out of anything it touches.
> 
> The question was actually about guitar amp input level.
> 
>> There are people, like Uli Jon Roth*, who use active electronics to eliminate the influence of the guitar cable, to always have a consistent sound no matter what cable you happen to have at hand.
> 
> Yep, I certainly do:
> 
>  http://www.till.com/articles/GuitarPreamp
> 
>  -- Don
> --
> Donald Tillman, Palo Alto, California
> http://www.till.com
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> http://synth-diy.org/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy