I just bought myself an oscilloscope and...woah [guitar signal levels]

[Seljer]

This morning the postman finally arrived with my Rigol DS1052E. A fine little digital oscilloscope for the 320€ I payed for it. I looked at some LFO signals which were nicely LFOing, then I hooked up my guitar directly and...

...holy crap, I know I have hot humbuckers in this guitar but if pick some really aggressive thrash metal riffs on the attack I can hit like 8 volts peak to peak at times   though it usally stays around 3 to 5volts p-p for most strumming, between 1 and 2 volts for calmer playing. The RMS voltage sticks in the area between 300 and 800mV. No wonder I can hook this guitar up to a line level input and still get sound out of it.

[Pollinator95]

What pickups are those?
I'd quite like to measure my bass' output, but I can't really buy a 'scope.

[Jazznoise]

What's the impedance of your Pickups, though? You can lose an awful lot of signal from a low Z input! If not, then I guess you're gonna have to start running all your pedals at a min of 12 volts!

[Seljer]

The bridge pickup is a Swineshead Venom, supposedly 15kiloohms, ceramic magnet. The neck humbucker I rewound myself and has got a relatively low impedance (5.4k alltogether) but uses relatively thick wire, 4500 turns per coil, no idea about the magnet but I assume its ceramic as well. I know that height affects it, but the neck pickup has no trouble keeping up with the bridge regarding volume.

[PRR]

> I'd quite like to measure my bass' output, but I can't really buy a 'scope.

Does anybody really care?

If so.... it would not take many parts to build a semi-precision Peak-to-Peak rectifier.

[Jazznoise]

Does anybody really care?

Reminds me of a joke I heard recently, though it was aimed at Engineers.

How do you know a Bassist whose gotten too full of himself?

He looks at other people's shoes instead of his own!

[deadastronaut]

http://www.zeitnitz.de/Christian/scope_en/

[deadastronaut]

What pickups are those?
I'd quite like to measure my bass' output, but I can't really buy a 'scope.

http://www.zeitnitz.de/Christian/scope_en/

[Bill Mountain]

> I'd quite like to measure my bass' output, but I can't really buy a 'scope.

Does anybody really care?

If so.... it would not take many parts to build a semi-precision Peak-to-Peak rectifier.

I would say that plenty of bassists care.  We suffer from such huge variances in output volumes that some effects aren't usuable (too much or too little signal at the input).  It's a problem I've bemoaned several times on these forums and a few times directly to you.  We don't often have the benefit of an overdriven tube amp to mask issues with a poorly designed pedal.

[Seljer]

http://www.zeitnitz.de/Christian/scope_en/

I was messing around with that a couple of weeks ago and managed to get it sort of calibrated by using the computer to generate a 50Hz sine wave, then measuring it's value with my cheapo multiveter (if it's 2V AC setting is worth anything, and noting that its the RMS votlage, not the amplitude) and referencing it to what was on the screen when I fed the signal back.
I ended up using an opamp for a high input impedance buffer so whatever I hooked up wouldn't get loaded down by the computer's line input.


But yeah, I reccomend everyone buy a scope. Earlier I was even able to see the 550Khz oscillations that were making my pedal pick up radio and how it went away when I added some small capacitors

[NazzTazz]

What pickups are those?
I'd quite like to measure my bass' output, but I can't really buy a 'scope.

Google "Ideal rectifier" (mainly opamp + diodes) + integrator (opamp + cap) then feed this into your DMM (DC voltage).