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~Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. 12 equal music collaboration guitar improvisation rock

Easy DIY Sustainer System – One Way Ticket to Mars Blues



One Way Ticket to Mars Blues is an internet collaborative effort by bassist Glenn Smith and myself. The purpose of my post though is to illustrate a technique I developed many years ago to play my guitar in relative quiet while sounding like I have intensely loud amplification. The basic idea is to clamp a speaker to your guitar. Thus, this is temporary and doesn’t ruin anything if you are careful with what you are doing. Since I record direct in I use a Y connection to split the guitar signal between the amplifier driving the clamped speaker and my audio recoding device. Nearly any amplifier will do – right now I mostly use a honeytone practice amp that has a 1/8″ speaker by-pass socket I installed.

What you see clamped is a Dayton Audio Sound Exciter DAEX25 – this works the best of everything I’ve tried so far.

3 replies on “Easy DIY Sustainer System – One Way Ticket to Mars Blues”

Dear Chris,

Very interesting device, technique, as well as experiment. Glad to hear it!

Peace,

Mike

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