[sdiy] [AH] Custom ARP Avatar

[rob at secret-secret.com]

Hey Brian,

Not being able to send photos over these posts is both a boon, and a suckage! 

What I did with the pickup from the GK-2 for the GR-1 is velcro. I used it for the pickup, and the controls. This way it wont mess up my guitar, but still works well. It was a bit challenging to find velcro the right thickness for the pickup, but it’s a tiny thing, and tucks in right at the bridge. 

It would be pretty cool though if a hex pickup could be made to fit in where say a bridge pickup sat. That way you wouldn’t have to mess up the guitar at all, and it wouldn’t look weird either. 

The more modern Roland pickups look to be mini hum buckers with two poles per string. The early ones may have been this way too, but I’ve not had one to check it out.

Much like what you are talking about with this setup I did for a Yamaha Keytar so that I could send power to it without having to use batteries. The cable was basically a five pin midi cable, and I used the two extra pins for power. On the non-keyboard end I used a project box with a 5 pin din for the powered cable, and socket for a wall wart, and a midi out 5 pin din. This worked pretty well until I lent the whole setup to someone, and it was returned “not working.”

It was pretty easy to put together, so I would imagine a similar set up to use the Roland GK pickups, and 13 pin cable to interface to an Avatar would be pretty easy to get going. Heck these days with all the PCB Way stuff it could probably be made very cleanly too.

-Rob-

> On Mar 28, 2025, at 9:04 PM, brianw <brianw at audiobanshee.com> wrote:
> 
> I am a guitarist, so I'm way more picky about modifying a guitar to add another pickup, given the drilling and alignment issues, much less finding a place to squeeze it in between the strings and the body. I prefer to fidget with electronics or wiring and leave the mechanical guitar work to the professionals, but someone else might find wiring adapters and piecing together a power supply more trouble than building a custom guitar.

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