Electric Guitar Output Voltage Levels

[tomstuder]

Designing your own effects pedal, having a rough idea of the pickup output levels you're dealing with can be helpful.

For anyone interested, I recently did some measurements and posted the results here:

http://tomsguitarprojects.blogspot.ch/2014/12/electric-guitar-output-voltage-levels.html

[ClenchedTeeth]

Thanks! I have bookmarked that and will find it useful in the near future.

[amptramp]

Is this measured at the pickup coil or at the output after the volume/tone controls?  Good data either way!

[Quackzed]

good solid info. this backs up some of my own observations as well.
seems like generally we think of a 100-300mv signal in designing distortions etc, but a big E chord can get near 1V!
i always felt that an average guitars signal had been slightly underestimated, seemed like my guitars always were hotter
than I thought...

[PRR]

Thanks.

Multiple strings (chord) make a difference almost proportional to the number of strings.

Series pickups double.

Humbuckers are 5X-10X bigger, which explains changes in amp inputs around the time humbuckers appeared.

Decay happens at two rates, which is also observed on piano. The initial decay may be a bit slower, the tail of the decay is very similar to piano (~~3dB/sec).

[Blitz Krieg]

nice

[karbomusic]

but a big E chord can get near 1V!

My last round of testing was hitting near 1.2V and the below appears to show the same. It's something that should always be considered with circuits such as clean boosts. The ones I now build accept up to 18V since it's tough to get very much "clean" boost with 9V:

http://www.muzique.com/lab/pick.htm

http://www.muzique.com/lab/boost.htm

[anotherjim]

Good work.
Useful data.

Interesting to see there's a fairly consistent factor between A and B amplitudes depending on p/u type.
All single coil tests - about 3
All humbucker tests - about 5