Guitarists sometimes replace their stock pickups in the hope of improving their guitar's tone. This step by step guide shows you how to swap your existing guitar-pickups for new ones. 

The Ruby Amp is a great little battery powered solidstate practice amp. The design is based on the Little Gem design which in turn comes from the Smokey Amp designed by Dave Stork on www.blueguitar.org. The design uses relatively few components and is a good DIY project. Cigar box guitar maker J.K. built a Ruby Amp but found himself hunting for a suitable enclosure for it.

The orange Boss DS-1 distortion pedal has been around since 1978. With one tone knob, one level knob, and a distortion knob, it can produce sounds ranging from a thin, light distortion up to a heavier harsher sound.

This project is a detailed guide on how to re-wire a vintage Fender Mustang

Link: How to re-wire a Fender Mustang

Via: Makezine

In the early 1980s computers were the latest thing, bleepy sounding records started appearing in the charts and the sythesizer became established in the music industry. At the same time guitar synthesizers started to appear. There were synth guitars from established keyboard synth makers like Roland, Casio, and Yamaha.

Tremolo has a number of meanings for the guitarist. Tremolo bridges (like in a Fender strat.) allow you to wobble the pitch of a note. In some amplifiiers (and effects pedals) you also have a tremolo effect which varies the volume to give you a wobbly noise reminiscent of 50's and 60's guitar instrumental music (think of the guitar at the start of the Twin Peaks theme).

This is a sample project from MAKE magazine, which shows you how to build a cracker box guitar amplifier for around $5 . It only shows the first few pages of the project, but it gives the schematic for the circuit and you should be able to work out how to finish it yourself.

USB ports are everywhere these days, so why not put one in your guitar? This project from PCMag describes how to embed a USB audio interface in your guitar. This digitises your guitar's signal ready for recording on your PC's hard drive.

This is a PCB (printed circuit board) layout for designed for fuzz face effects unit. The circuit is designed so you can tweak the cicuit to get different tones. It uses sockets you can easily swap components in and out of your fuzz face.

When you're playing in a band, going a little out of tune is forgivable but if you lose timing the whole thing falls apart. To help your timing why not try this metronome project?

Following on from yesterday's post about the Alesis AirFX guitar, I thought someone must have put a Korg Kaos Pad into a guitar, and it turns out some guy called Phil has already done it. The Kaos Pad is a multi-effects unit (designed for electronic musicians and DJs) with a square touch sensitive pad.

This project describes how to make a strobe tuner "The Tune Trainer". It is quite tricky as it involves an Arduino microprocessor and prototyping board, which can be programmed via your computer. The link below lists the other electronic bits and pieces needed and gives detailed instructions.

The tuner has two tuning modes

Ever wondered what is inside your guitars tone or volume knob? This article at geofex.com is a great introduction to understanding how your guitar controls work. The controls are potentiometers (pots for short) : a type of variable resistor.