Projects for Guitarists (Anderton, Craig)

Rating: 5
Year: 1995
Genre: Music, Electronics
Read again? Yes

Of my three project books, this is the one I never really cracked open. By the time I got this one, my interest in building my own guitar effects--and my interest in electronics--went on a back shelf in favor of other things.

This isn't a re-packaging of Anderton's "Electronic Projects for Musicians"; he does give some basics in the first couple of chapters, but the 35 projects in this book are all new, many gathered from Anderton's columns in Guitar Player Magazine):

Wall-wart tamer (mini extension cord with switch)
AC adapter hum-buster
Making crossfade & pan-pot pedals
Effects-order switcher
Power/Status indicator monitor
Stereo/Mono breakout box
Buffer Board
"Clarifier" On-board preamp/EQ
Beat the DI blues with IGGY (direct-injection box)
Frequency Booster
Phase switcher
AC power supply/battery eliminator
AC-powered practice amp
Signal switcher
Volume pedal de-scratcher
Cheap & Cheerful (Guitar) tone mods
Humbucking Pickup Tricks
Pots & Pans (pan-pot add-on to guitars)
Telecaster Rewiring
Balanced/Unbalanced Adapter
Direct Injector
Tape Recorder to Echo-unit conversion
Building a Better Bypass
Restoring Vintage Effects
Vintage Effects de-hisser
Adding Presets to Vintage Effects
Go/No-Go Cord Tester
Testing Impedance
LED Level Meter
"Tri-Test" Cord Checker
Designing an on-board (in-guitar) pre-amp
Octave-doubling fuzz
Quadrafuzz
Rocktave Divider
"Stack in a Box" tube preamp

One very helpful section helps you translate between American and International capacitor values (this information would have been useful in Penfold's book).

Well-written, with plenty of drawings and parts lists. There's no "sound page" as with Anderton's other book, but I won't quibble over something like that.

Electronic Projects for Guitar (Penfold, RA)

Rating: 4
Year: 1992
Genre: Music, Electronics
Read again? Yes

Of the three musical electronics project books, this one was the most difficult to understand, since the author uses British (or European? Metric?) notation on some components. Once I got used to that, though, everything fell into place.

Not that I ever built any of the projects. I got some ideas from Penfold's book, all of them added to a big folder with all my other electronics/music stuff, but nothing ever seemed to get built. I was always working on something else--fixing a car, learning a song, playing along with Rush tapes (NEVER the LP's!), stripping electronic components from broken TV's, radios, or whatever. I've got a sizable collection of resistors, capacitors, and all that...in storage.

Penfold gives us 16 projects after a cursory course in soldering, assembly, and testing:

Guitar preamp
Headphone amp
Soft distortion
Compressor
Auto-Wah (he spells it "Waa")
Wah-wah pedal
Phaser
Dual Tracking effects unit
Expander
Treble booster
Dynamic treble booster
Dynamic tremolo
Direct-injection box
Improved distortion box
Thin distortion unit
Guitar tuner

The schematics, assembly drawings, and parts lists are well-done; the projects are built up on simple breadboard with point-to-point wiring, but since there doesn't seem to be anything critical you could probably get away with the "dead bug" assembly method to make things take up even less space.

Some of the schematic symbols and part numbers didn't match anything I'd seen before, but that was before the Internet and Google, so sourcing most of the active components (transistors, integrated circuits) or equivalents shouldn't be too hard.

Electronic Projects for Musicians (Anderton, Craig)

Rating: 5
Year: 1975, 1980
Genre: Music, Electronics
Read again? Yes


Around the same time I was learning to play guitar--late '80s, early '90s--I was also into electronics.

I figured it'd be fun to build my own guitar effects and such...but I never built anything. I studied, planned, tinkered with stomp boxes I already had, but to this day I've yet to start or finish any of Anderton's example projects.

It's not him. It's me. Always wanted to say that.

The book's a reasonably comprehensive mini electronics course. In the first four chapters, Anderton introduces various electronic components and where to source them, what sort of tools you'll need, and assembly techniques, enclosures, soldering, testing, and the all-important "smoke test" when the project either catches fire or works like it's supposed to.

Chapter 5 introduces the books' 27 projects, including a simple pre-amp, headphone amp, tone controls, distortion, an 8-input mixer, phaser, talk box (think Joe Walsh or Peter Frampton), and a noise gate...hell, here's the list:

Preamp
Metronome
Passive tone control
Headphone amp
Mini-amp
Ultra-fuzz
Bass fuzz
Compressor/Limiter
Ring Modulator
Dual-filter voicing unit
Adding bypass switches to effects
Guitar rewiring
Bipolar AC adaptor
Treble booster
Electronic footswitch
Tuning standard
Super Tone Control
8-in, 1-out mixer
Using a volt-ohm-millammeter
Practice play-along
Phase shifter
Making patch cords
Talk box
Tube-sound fuzz
Envelope Follower
Spluffer
Noise gate

Chapter 6 discusses different ways of patching the effects together, since your overall sound will be affected by the order in which effects are connected.

As a bonus, my copy of the book came with a flimsy record page with examples of many of the effects in action.

Looking over the list, I can't see me building a Tuning Standard because in the past 20 years small tuners have become cheap and small enough to fit in your guitar case. Most of the rest might bear revisiting, though--I'll need to dig out my big folder full of scribbled notes and schematics. It's always more fun to just look at the stuff, try to figure out how it works.

Overall, the book's well-written and illustrated, with parts lists for each project and plenty of assembly photos. Of the three books like this in my collection, this is the best.

51 High-Tech Practical Jokes for the Evil Genius (Graham, Brad & McGowan, Kathy)

Rating: 5/5
Year: 2008
Genre: Nonfiction, tech/electronics
Read again? Yup.


They're baaaaack. I see this as a companion book to Graham & McGowan's "101 Spy Gadgets for the Evil Genius" because many of the the spy toys could easily be re-purposed to serve practical jokes.

This is a book of little mechanical gimmicks that go bump in the night, make random cricket noises, or jump out of a box and scare the living crap out of you. It's good for all year 'round, but what Halloween display is complete without a brain in a jar?

What about a stink machine that can be hidden in a victim's room?

Some of the projects require basic electronics skills; others require some basic woodworking. With some creativity, anything in this book will give you ideas for your own evil projects.

101 Spy Gadgets for the Evil Genius (Graham, Brad & McGowan, Kathy)

Rating: 5/5
Year:2006
Genre: Nonfiction Tech/Electronics
Read Again? Yup.

This is one cool book, a combination of build-it-yourself projects and simple hardware hacks broken down into 15 sections.

Wanna see how to make a parabolic microphone out of a wok lid? Page 12.

Wanna hack a rifle scope to make a telephoto lens for your digital camera? Page 48.

Wanna build a robot that uses some of the other stuff the authors introduce, including a panning camera mount, night vision, radio control, a microphone, and payload drop? Page 219.

We find out how to modify everyday items into sneaky spy tools: a magic marker becomes a camera; a stuffed animal becomes a nanny-cam; a soft drink can becomes a room bug.

If you think you're being spied upon, there are some nifty gadgets for you! A laser pointer can toast a night-vision camera. Hack a cheap camera and re-purpose the flash unit into a 1,000-volt shocker (either portable or mounted on something you're trying to protect).

For the computer-hacking folks, there's a hardware key-logger that plugs in between the keyboard and computer. Kind of bulky-looking, but who looks behind their computer all that often?

All around, it's a fun and interesting read for the hobbyist, tinkerer, and nosy curtain-twitcher in us all.