"Tone Suck", Back EMF and "The Redeemer"

[lovekraft0]

Skip, thank you very much for your good-natured and coherent explanation - if it indeed performs as described, it's true innovation, and should be patented.  Good luck with it!

[amz-fx]

All the pick-ups see now are the controls in your guitar and then the Redeemer with greater than 2M ohm input impedance.  The pick-ups don't have to develop much current looking at 2M ohms so the strings feel little if any counter EMF.

The pickups are not looking into 2M...  since your instructions have the buffer being installed right before the guitar's output jack,  the pickups are loaded by the volume control at all times.

C1 and the 2M are the input to the circuit, and we can assume that C1 is 0 ohms at audio frequencies, then the pickups are seeing the parallel combination of the Volume control (250k) and the 2M input Z of the buffer...  or 222,222 ohms.

In the more usual configuration, the on-board preamp/buffer has the pickups connected directly to the circuit (where they see the high input Z of the circuit) and the Volume control is on the output of the preamp/buffer where it does not load the pickups.

Just an observation...

-Jack

[puretube]

free information sucks...

[RDV]

You know, the difference between us on this forum and most of the rest of them is our curiosity. We're the kind of guys who take almost everything we buy apart just to see what it's made of, how it works etc. This bothers a lot of people(including some of our members) because(they feel) it's a threat to their livelihood, which is certainly understandable as paranoia is a part(at least to a small extent) of all our lives. I cannot imagine how small(boutique) companies must view this forum with it's huge size, knowledgeable members, and immense curiosity. I wish them all the best of luck, and give them my word(as a man) that clones of their products will not show on eBay made by me.

Ricky Don Vance

[gez]

I wish them all the best of luck, and give them my word(as a man)

Or woman!...sorry, just got an attack of the monty pythons! 

[AWelti]

Jack,
Thanks for your observation - you are absolutely correct - that's why I said:
"All the pick-ups see now are the controls in your guitar and then the Redeemer with greater than 2M ohm input impedance"

I probably should have worded the next line to read:
"The guitar doesn't have to develop much current looking at 2M ohms so the strings feel little if any counter EMF from the outside world."

My bad... but, I did know that... 

Some folks ask to have the volume pots changed out for 500K or 1M...  some folks just take them out completely.  The 250K volume pot would load a pick-up down roughly 3%.  Compared to a good 20ft cable which knocks hi-end down roughly 25%  before getting loaded by the first pedal (that could be anywhere for 50K to 2M)... 

We were going for a way to take the variance of cables and loads out of the equation; leaving the predictable, known controls of the guitar in command of your sound... the back EMF thing was first noticed by the beta-testers.  About half of them mentioned that the guitar felt easier to play, so we set-up some experiments and confirmed that it does affect the strings - so that came about thanks to user feedback.

The Gyrator is an interesting circuit I'd like to put to use, but that's not what you'll find in a Redeemer - here's some info about Gyrators:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrator