Sustain (Never Ending Notes?)

[edd29]

how about this

[CynicalMan]

What about the Colorsound Supasustain schem at scematic heaven? any1 try that?

I think that's just a compressor, so it wouldn't give you never ending sustain.

That piezo sustainer looks interesting.

[BAARON]

Actually, I think it's a sustainer driver with a compressor built into it... notice the "from pickup" and "to driver" points, as well as the 386 chip for the driver.

[amptramp]

Has anybody ever tried using one pickup as a sensor and another as a string driver on a guitar?

It seems if you could handle the power in a low-impedance pickup, you could feed the input through an amplifier to that pickup.  The string driver would either have to be mounted off-centre with respect to the strings or only apply power as the string was approaching the middle position and cut off power when the string was moving away from the centre, the same as you "pump" when you are on a swing.  This could give you a sustain that would not require any audio feedback, so you could run it in a studio.  Since the bandwidth of a string is very small, you would not need to feed much power into it.  The energy lost per cycle is much smaller than the energy stored (i.e. high Q resonance).  Even with six strings operating at different frequencies, the effect should be the same as feedback from a speaker - each string will feed back to itself and ignore other frequencies because of the low bandwidth of each string.

This might be something better built into a guitar rather than external like a stompbox so you don't need guitar input and output cables.

[space_ryerson]

Has anybody ever tried using one pickup as a sensor and another as a string driver on a guitar?

That's how the Sustainiac, Fernandes Sustainer and Floyd Rose Sustainer all work

Here's a rough schematic from the Floyd Rose Sustainer's patent to give an idea of how they work:

This sustainer runs at 18v. Part 34 is the sustainer driver (in the neck pickup position) and part 24 is the bridge pickup.