Pedal resophonic anyone?

Brad Higgins · From: New York, USA

Here are some pictures of one of my creations that I sold a few years back, I'm still kicking my own butt for ever parting with it! The video was recorded when I still had it tuned as a 10 string E9th/B6th universal, before I changed it to C6th.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1AtULmcXLg

Herb Steiner · From: Briarcliff TX 78669, pop. 2,064

Interesting creation! See my post on the "Chicken-picken" thread.
_________________
My rig: Infinity and Telonics.

Son, we live in a world with walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with steel guitars. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg?

Brad Higgins · From: New York, USA

I just wanted to tell everyone about this strange looking machine. It’s so strange looking because an awful lot of thought went into designing it. The main reason it has such a strange design is because of the resonator, the cone is so sensitive that even the slightest sound or vibration is drastically amplified, ask any Dobro player. Even just touching your fingerpick to the cone cover can be fairly loud. The hardest part of designing this beast was keeping all of the mechanical noises of the pedals, from being amplified by the resonator. First I decided to use a Paul Beard kit body, because I knew that he had some of the best sounding resonator guitars in the business. I also needed to isolate it from all of the mechanical sounds, so I completely rubber mounted the Beard body to the chassis, there is NOTHING on that guitar that comes in direct contact with the body except the strings resting on the saddle. Now I’ll get to the backwards design of the chassis, yes, I am half Polish, but I can assure you, that has absolutely nothing to do with it. One reason is that it gets the changer as far away from the resonator as possible for obvious reasons, the other reason is that the entire string stretches every time you step on a pedal, with this design about 90% of the string is on the changer side of the bridge, so the string slides back and forth across the bridge (or saddle) about 1/10th as much as the normal design. On a pedal steel the changer is the bridge and the string slippage is across the roller nut, with this design I let the bridge take the place of the roller nut, so it would hold a tuning better. I’ll say one more thing about the resonator sensitivity, it’s so sensitive that I had to make a small pickguard and then glue a 1/8” thick piece of rubber on top to keep pick noise from being recorded, because I was recording it acoustically, you can see pickguard in the picture that’s in front of the piano. That’s why it looks so weird! Just one more thing, if you listen to the recording see if you can hear any kind of mechanical noises.

Robert Parent · From: Gillette, WY

Very interesting, thanks for posting....

Do you have any photo of the bottom side?

Robert

Jeff Garden · From: Center Sandwich, New Hampshire, USA

Very cool, Brad, and your last post answered lots of my questions. I'm always amazed at what's going on in the minds of clever people and why and how inventions developed the way they did.

Brad Higgins · From: New York, USA

Brad Higgins · From: New York, USA

One of the problems encountered with the pedalization a reso guitar in years past was supporting the extra pressure on the very thin cone to keep it from collapsing under the strain. I believe Paul Franklin Sr. figured that problem out, though I don't know his method of doing so.

How did you solve that problem?

That was a question from Herb Steiner on my other thread.

The zero tension guitar soundboard design that ALMOST became a C. F. Martin.

Where the tuners attach to the square tube at the end of the guitar, the hole is vertically slotted so the amount of string tension on the cone can be adjusted. What was great was the fact that I could experiment with cone tension, and I know that there will be some people who are going to disagree with my next statement, but I'm going to post it anyway. What I found is, I got the absolute fattest, fullest, and loudest sound when I set just enough tension on the cone to keep the strings from buzzing in the saddle slots. Increasing cone tension didn't increase anything, it merely reduced lows and lower mids and made it sound brighter. I didn't just trust my ear, I have a decibel meter and a room spectrum analizer that I use for testing the violins and violin pickups that I make. Hal Rugg once tried it at a steel convention in Conn and he couldn't believe how much louder it was than his Franklin. Getting back to string tension, heavy gauge strings are louder, but itâ€™s not due to the higher string tension, the key word is heavy, there is more moving mass which will have a larger affect on anything it is in contact with. Saying that heavy gauge strings are louder because of the higher string tension is just like saying that wood floats, and ducks float, therefore they are made of wood. After building that beast, it spurred into testing my theories a little more, so in the 1990s I built the guitar in the pics below. This little guitar has what I call a zero tension soundboard, meaning that there is absolutely NO string tension on the soundboard. If you look closely at the bridge and saddle youâ€™ll notice that the strings pass through small, slightly diagonal holes in the saddle, and there is NO downward tension on the soundboard, hence, much less soundboard bracing is necessary. I brought that little guitar to an appointment that I made with Dick Boak, the head of artist relations at C. F. Martin, and he was quite impressed. He said, I canâ€™t really compare apples to oranges, so Iâ€™ll give you an unassembled D28 consisting of rejected parts, so you can build it and incorporate your design, and weâ€™ll schedule another appointment. He also said that a friend of his had a Patent on a design like that, and he gave me Ned Steinbergerâ€™s phone number. Sure enough, Ned did have a Patent, but he then said, youâ€™ve gotten farther with Martin than I ever did and Dick is a friend of mine, so if you can make this go Iâ€™ll cut you in for half of the royalties. At my next appointment they liked the sound of the prototype enough that they accepted the design. After three years of Martin dragging their feet, I knew that it was because bridge and saddle design was just a little too different, making many of the final setup procedures more difficult, not to mention having to have some piezo transducers completely redesigned to fit this strange design. So I came up with a low tension design (see the last picture of the bridge with the midi pickup) that would make it so much easier for them to manufacture. When I went back they said and I quote â€œif you can get a Patent on that design we will manufacture itâ€. Eighteen months after applying for a Patent, my Patent examiner mailed me a copy of a Patent which was virtually identical to mine, and it had a filing date of 1896. Needless to say, my wife and I were pretty devastated, thatâ€™s when I said the hell with guitars, and I switched over to building violins. At least I learned a lot from all of the experimenting that I did. I just thought that not only was the story worth sharing, but a lot of important information about all of the misconceptions about string tension and sound.

Brad Higgins · From: New York, USA

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