I'm fascinated by acoustic properties. If it makes a sound, I'm interested. So when the news came across my Facebook timeline that an inventor made a guitar amp that increases sound levels of an electric guitar by 12 decibels...without using electricity, I went crazy!
Canadian company, DelSonix has just introduced a "speaker," known as the SD28, that is made of a hollow wooden pickup with a bottom-resonating cavity. The contraption is clamped to the guitar's headstock. It picks up the instrument's vibrations, while a resonator projects the sound.
In a way, it's similar to a Victrola record machine, taking acoustic vibrations and amplifying them through a wooden tube and out into a cone.
DelSonix says the invention works with all electric guitars and basses (hmm...cigar box guitars?) and can increase loudness from 6 to 12dB, depending on guitar design. By rotating the resonator, guitarists can project the sound in specific directions, while the entire device rolls up into a 1-inch tube for storage.
The SD28 is available now. It costs $34 CAN ($24 U.S.) and ships to Canada, U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Replies
Hi, all interesting. Is it the wall or door you hear resonating, or the fact that due to extra mass added to the peghead/neck the strings at the box end are driving the soundboard more efficiently, so more volume?
Just athought. Taff
Proud to see that here on the ultimate do it yourself instrument forum everyone's picking this as a doable DIY project. $35 for a plastic cone, a stick and a clamp. With flaws. The stick wastes energy. The clamp itself will also take energy away from the cone. But I guess neither can be helped. No stick and a much smaller clamp would be improvements.
Turtlehead, you might get move volume with a single piece of wood instead of a box. And a much smaller clamp. No paper and shave end ends down as thin as possible. Omni directional so it wont be aimed right at you.
I get more volume out of mine by putting the headstock against a wall. : )
Also check out the Stroh violin for a similar sort of thing.
This reminds me of a story Les Paul told about when He was a kid. He used a old Victrola needle and embedded it in his acoustic guitar bridge, then attached wires to the Victrola horn. He got the idea from the windows rattling when a train rolled down the tracks near his home.
What you've done is clamp essentially a Helmholtz resonator to your headstock. Shaping the dimensions of the box will result in specific frequency range reinforcement. Been doing a lot of reading on folded horns, Voight pipes, and transmission line speaker enclosures for passive sound reinforcement.
Piece o' cake. I can build all of these tomorrow afternoon for under $10.
But wait 'til you hear what can be done with a radical CBG design I came up with while building three variations on an electric guitar amplifier plywood passive DIY Sound Enhancer (of which I need to post pics and video files).
Muahahahahaha...
At this point ,us Brits of a certain age will have read Oily's last post and will have visions of Rhubarb , shakily hammering and sawing in his shed in the dead of night while Custard lurks outside with his hands over his ears and the birds on the washing line giggling :-D
It's neat, but it's the guitar version of putting your smartphone in a bowl when you play music on it. Someone / some company will make a Chinese copy, um, version and sell it for $1.
Hopefully Sean someone will, I would be off to Poundland like a shot !
Has anyone in CBN tried this out yet ? I understand how it works with a solid body guitar, as the video demonstrates, but I'm guessing the more hollow the body , the less volume increase would be achieved . I'm guessing if you clipped it to the headstock of a J200 the volume projected from it's soundhole would be far louder than the sound from the cone ? I may be totally wrong, but thought I would put it out there .....
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