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Has anyone ever built a spring reverb inside a guitar?


gambit

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When I play my Strat or Mustang unplugged, I can hear the springs in the trem resonating - it's particularly noticeable on certain notes. I kind of like it.
:)
But putting a spring reverb, with its much lighter springs into a guitar body? It would be way too sensitive to motion to be usable IMO.

 

I love that effect on my jazzmaster with the strings behind the bridge. Though it's different than the mustang/strat trem setup, I think it's in a similar vein. It sounds really cool when you're playing loudly, and it gets picked up. Kind of adds some ghost notes :love:

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you know, i'm going to let my inner Tesla go sit in the corner for a while and back off this project... I have TOOOOOOOOOO many guitar projects at this time and this can go on the WAYYYYYYYY backburner... sorry folks... but in a DYI & less elegant way, here is how you can do this to just about any guitar [with pics]:

 

 

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add a short patch cable and it is externally what i was going to do in a hollowbody... 9v powered, has it's own on/off switch, and you can even do some delay tweaking if you do the uma mod

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  • 9 years later...
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I'm doing this:

I have an old cheap Asian Strat knockoff that plays nice.

The guitar came with a fake Filipino Jazzmaster trem that was never really meant to be taken seriously, so I put a good bridge on, gutted the spring and arm from the trem and left the plate there.

This leaves a convenient steel plate covered box at the butt of the guitar.

I stuck half a p-bass pickup down in the hole.

It fits just right.

I have some trem springs laying around, and there's just enough room in the cavity to attach them with eye-screws to the wood under where the bridge is mounted, and stretch them just a little, across the p-bass pickup, and attach the other end at the back of the hole.

I attached a tuner to a little bench jig I made, and found that you can tune a strat trem spring to E or B without very much stretch at all.

I'll give the bass pickup it's own volume control, which I can mount thru the hole where the trem arm used to stick out of the plate.

I had to do a small bit of routing there, but it fits.

I've had this idea of in-guitar spring reverb for a long time, inspired by the same idea as someone above, hearing my trem springs resonate on Strats and Jazzmasters.

I put a tele pickups on this guitar in a Strat config, two chrome neck pups and a stock tele bridge, wired with a five way switch.

It's going to be Leo's nightmare come true, A Strato-Jazza-Tele.

The illegal, but authentic looking "Stratocaster" decal is missing the middle letters 'TO', so I'm going to put a matching 'Y'  in their place. 

It's going to be weird no matter how it turns out, but what I'm hoping for,

is the love child of Ennio Morricone and a Bond girl. 

 

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