easy pedal smooth mod

[Digital Larry]

I'm not quite that silly, I'm an IT geek - I was trying to work out WTF "cable polarity" meant in context of small audio - nothing, just like in my job.

Then perhaps you would care to pontificate on the benefits of CAT-6 and GIGe for preserving the fragile harmonics of your posts to this forum?   

[Jdansti]

This guitar cable has polarity.

[mistahead]

I'm not quite that silly, I'm an IT geek - I was trying to work out WTF "cable polarity" meant in context of small audio - nothing, just like in my job.

Then perhaps you would care to pontificate on the benefits of CAT-6 and GIGe for preserving the fragile harmonics of your posts to this forum?  

FIBRE:
Glass is PURE for PURE tonal quality.
Multi-mode is more versatile than Single-mode.
Clean, probably great for jazz.

CAT-5/6
METAL - very important for getting more METAL into your sound!
EMI can interfere with it unless you go shielded - which means EVEN MORE METAL!!!!
Cross-talk can occur on cheap cables where twists are not done well, potentially creating some noise and feedback loops.... WHICH ARE METAL AS!!!

Wireless
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA for telecasting country F*GSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Something like that mate?    

[J0K3RX]

This guitar cable has polarity.

um... no, it doesn't

[J0K3RX]

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.

[nordine]

for all intents and purposes it's a choke as found on a tube amp. it saturates nicely usually.

or go 1:1 and isolate the output of the effect and the jack if you really want that transformer saturation sound.

could you expand more on that? isolation? cant figure it out, thanks

[Digital Larry]

Something like that mate?    

Haven't smelled mojo like that in about 11 years.   

[DougH]

If you look at a guitar signal on an oscilloscope, it's generally NOT symmetrical.  If you amplified this perfectly cleanly, I'd wager that even old Diamond-Ears (EJ) would have a hard time knowing the difference.  But if it goes into an amp with some asymmetrical clipping then yeah you betcha I'm pretty sure you don't have to turn the lava lamp up very bright to imagine that the waveform and sound are going to be a bit different.

There is a point in here that is very good.

There are a lot of simplifying assumptions and etc made in electronics and audio theory that are based on using simple pure sine waves. Guitar signals are not simple pure sine waves. They are no where even close. They are very complex waves with harmonics of harmonics along with the fundamental. Mid, high, and sub harmonics of the fundamental abound in a single plucked guitar string. Now strum a chord and you increased the complexity exponentially, not just by multiplying all those above effects by 6 (which wouldn't be exponential), but because of the interaction of the separate strings with each other, and more subtly, mechanical interactions between the strings and the hardware on the guitar. And then consider that a guitar signal is not constant either. There is a huge transient and a decay envelope. And there's no particular symmetry to it either. Look at a guitar signal on a scope and it's a mess.

Now before people go wild rationalizing all kinds of mojo based on this one point- you have to understand the theory enough to know where this might affect an assumption you have made based on a pure sine wave. For most of the things we do, pure sine waves give you a reasonable enough picture of say, how a filter will work, or how a stage will clip a signal. It's not an exact representation of how the circuit will behave with a guitar plugged in, but it's good for making comparisons and design choices.

But Larry's point is a good example of where you really have to look at the guitar signal itself, to get a better understanding of the reason for a particular behavior (change of sound due to polarity in this case).

[Jdansti]

This guitar cable has polarity.

um... no, it doesn't

Please try it and let us know...   

[Digital Larry]

Now before people go wild rationalizing all kinds of mojo based on this one point- you have to understand the theory enough to know where this might affect an assumption you have made based on a pure sine wave. For most of the things we do, pure sine waves give you a reasonable enough picture of say, how a filter will work, or how a stage will clip a signal. It's not an exact representation of how the circuit will behave with a guitar plugged in, but it's good for making comparisons and design choices.

Thanks for the vote of confidence DougH!    As an old fart I get a little weepy when people actually pay attention to me.  

I am TOTALLY IN LINE with "what's a sine wave look like going through this circuit"?  But that is mostly the result of getting an EE degree where your understanding of how things work is heavily based on mathematics.  And I believe those things too, with the caveat that in the real world there is no such thing as a purely "lumped, linear, constant" system (which is the basis for those theories to give you valid results).  So while one's theoretical results can get pretty close, they are never the absolute truth.  And sometimes they are not true at all.

Now getting back to music, this thought of guitar signal asymmetry struck me a few months back in the context of low/medium gain overdrive, asymmetrical diode clipping, and transistor fuzz circuits.  I believe there is much subtlety to be found in these circuits because what they do to the top half of your signal is different than the bottom half.  And if your guitar itself starts off asymmetrical, which it very clearly does, then people might be missing a whole other universe of tone "on the other side of the looking glass" that could be theirs for the simple addition of a global polarity switch on the output of their guitar (though there might be some grounding/shielding issues to contend with).

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.

I must stop here to acknowledge the late David F. Tuttle, my circuit analysis professor.  His textbook opened each chapter with a quote from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" which was one of my favorite childhood books.  He was a slightly eccentric but amazing guy who imparted a really valuable understanding of the physical world to me and was one of the most influential people in my life.

[R O Tiree]

Hmmm... rather than swapping terminals on your guitar, with all the hum/noise problems you alluded to above, Larry, how about being able to selectively switch in an inverter after the input buffer?  Even simpler, how about a 2PDT switch to switch diodes in and out, so with it selected one way, you get 2 diodes "facing" left and one right... switch it the other way you get 1 left and 2 right...

[DougH]

Thanks for the vote of confidence DougH!    As an old fart I get a little weepy when people actually pay attention to me.  

I am TOTALLY IN LINE with "what's a sine wave look like going through this circuit"?  But that is mostly the result of getting an EE degree where your understanding of how things work is heavily based on mathematics.  And I believe those things too, with the caveat that in the real world there is no such thing as a purely "lumped, linear, constant" system (which is the basis for those theories to give you valid results).  So while one's theoretical results can get pretty close, they are never the absolute truth.  And sometimes they are not true at all.

As old farts we will weep together, Larry.  

One of my big lessons in pursuit of my EE degree was that math as used in science and engineering is just a model of reality. The prediction of behavior is only as good as the model. There are "lo-fi" and "hi-fi" math models of physical phenomena. Most of what we deal with here is pretty lo-fi. It's basically "more than good enough" for the things we do.

But if you want to get into explaining or bucking myths about unexplained behavior or other esoterica, you better come packing more than Ohm's Law and a background in high school algebra to really model it. While I don't agree with the mojo-crowd who makes up the pseudo-science as they go along to rationalize their nonsense, it's also a mistake to completely ignore a perception because your Fourier series of a sine wave doesn't explain it- when you're dealing with a complex signal like an electric guitar.

[Digital Larry]

Hmmm... rather than swapping terminals on your guitar, with all the hum/noise problems you alluded to above, Larry, how about being able to selectively switch in an inverter after the input buffer?  Even simpler, how about a 2PDT switch to switch diodes in and out, so with it selected one way, you get 2 diodes "facing" left and one right... switch it the other way you get 1 left and 2 right...

Hi RO,

Now we are in "teach a man to fish" territory.   

On the other side is the possibility that most people might not be able to tell the difference.  Witness Joe Gore's comparison of the Klon Centaur to a BYOC Tube Screamer.

A standalone buffer/invertor pedal might also do the trick without needing to resort to any drastic surgery of the guitar.

DL

[duck_arse]

I wonder what the op would make of this "polarity of an ac signal" talk.

[johngreene]

Thanks for the vote of confidence DougH!    As an old fart I get a little weepy when people actually pay attention to me.  

I am TOTALLY IN LINE with "what's a sine wave look like going through this circuit"?  But that is mostly the result of getting an EE degree where your understanding of how things work is heavily based on mathematics.  And I believe those things too, with the caveat that in the real world there is no such thing as a purely "lumped, linear, constant" system (which is the basis for those theories to give you valid results).  So while one's theoretical results can get pretty close, they are never the absolute truth.  And sometimes they are not true at all.

As old farts we will weep together, Larry.  

One of my big lessons in pursuit of my EE degree was that math as used in science and engineering is just a model of reality. The prediction of behavior is only as good as the model. There are "lo-fi" and "hi-fi" math models of physical phenomena. Most of what we deal with here is pretty lo-fi. It's basically "more than good enough" for the things we do.

But if you want to get into explaining or bucking myths about unexplained behavior or other esoterica, you better coming packing more than Ohm's Law and a background in high school algebra to really model it. While I don't agree with the mojo-crowd who makes up the pseudo-science as they go along to rationalize their nonsense, it's also a mistake to completely ignore a perception because your Fourier series of a sine wave doesn't explain it- when you're dealing with a complex signal like an electric guitar.

One thing that I've come to realize is that 'models' for analysis are based on linear models of devices. Predicting non-linear behavior would require very complex modeling that needs to include things like die geometry in 3d space, etc. So if you use pspice to model a guitar distortion circuit, you are getting a very gross approximation because it really is only accurate during the linear transitions of your test sinusoidal waveform. IMO that's why designing these circuits is so much more a 'hands on' process than it is an engineering process. Engineering tells us there is no real difference between a JRC4558 and a TA75558 but our ears tell us a completely different story.

--john

[pinkjimiphoton]

if you reverse the phase on something, it may act subtly different i'd imagine. no mojo to it. depends on the material etc, hell, ej was talking about using them coily old rat shack cords, and if think about it, the braid in them goes in one direction, it wasn't "woven" they were "wrapped" in shield...maybe that affects the capacitance of the cable enough to be noticeable.

i mean, think like this for just one second. ever plug your stuff into an old amp with a phase reversal switch on the power?

it sounds different TO ME, anyways, depending on where that switch is set even if it shouldn't matter. one way the guitar will be punky and not as well interfaced, the other way it seems to come alive.  

and i have cords like that, but in that case they're specifically made with the actual shield only connected to ground on one side, with a hot and neutral center wire. THOSE ya can hear a DEFINITE difference in.

at least i think so, but man, chillin with owsley since i was a ween may have informed the goo betwixt my ears in ways others may not be blessed/cursed with..

[Digital Larry]

One thing that I've come to realize is that 'models' for analysis are based on linear models of devices. Predicting non-linear behavior would require very complex modeling that needs to include things like die geometry in 3d space, etc. So if you use pspice to model a guitar distortion circuit, you are getting a very gross approximation because it really is only accurate during the linear transitions of your test sinusoidal waveform. IMO that's why designing these circuits is so much more a 'hands on' process than it is an engineering process. Engineering tells us there is no real difference between a JRC4558 and a TA75558 but our ears tell us a completely different story.

--john

What engineering SHOULD teach is to adjust the model to the level of complexity of the problem being solved.  Linear models are just a starting point. 

Most of the engineering information available from component suppliers attempts to target the broadest applications/sales base.  This is economic good sense on the part of the supplier.  And my guess is that MI based applications are small for that market and so.

Still it's going to be hands on as no chart is going to tell you what it sounds like.  Simulations like LTSPICE as far as I know, do not model transistors well for grounded emitter applications.  I'd be happy to hear otherwise.

[aron]

Digital Larry, are you talking about phase or a directional cord? If you are saying that a cord is directional - lets hear it. Explain it. I already posted the explanation I found.

Why not go all the way like my friend said. Wire up a pedal making sure all the hook up wire is the same direction?

[Digital Larry]

Digital Larry, are you talking about phase or a directional cord?

Phase.  Thank you.

[aron]

Phase - oh ok. :-)
Now my friend actually did say that about wiring a pedal.