Noise Gate for Electric Banjo

[daeg]

After a decade of eyeballing the Goldtone EB-5, I finally bought one.



It's an awesome design. Simplistic like a Telecaster. It has all of the Banjo sounds, albeit in different proportions to an acoustic Banjo. Playability is excellent. So far, I love this thing.

There are, however, a few problems with it.

1. Neck Dive
   1. The body is light and it neck dives worse than an SG.
   2. The smooth round body causes it to slip all over the place when you play it seated.
2. Neck Pickup only
   1. When people think "Banjo", they think of a bight twangy sound.
   2. Picking up the sound towards the neck means a rounder, fuller, bassier, less bright sound.
   3. On top of this, they've used a high-output rail pickup (it looks generic, like it's made by Artec) which adds to the boomyness and lack of highs.
   4. This can almost make it sound like a classical guitar, opposed to a twangy country instrument.
   5. This might be remedied by a Graphic EQ. I'll report back on that later.
3. Too much Sustain
   
   1. The acoustic Banjo has this pop and quick decay when you pluck a note.
   2. This Banjo lacks pop because the small head and solid body sustain too well.
   3. This Banjo needs an expander!

 

[daeg]

So, I quickly whipped up an Expander in SpinCad designer and flashed the FV-1 pedal on my pedalboard. Playing around it with it, I can tell that Downward Expansion is going to make Bluegrass licks sound much more authentic.

Now, I'd like to build an analog Noise Gate and mod it to work as an expander / sustain reducer.

 

[Feral Feline]

Interesting project, but ... Wow, that's a lot of work to make a banjo sound like a banjo.

I wish I could whip up expanders and new how to play with SpinCad... I've never flashed anyone, let alone an FV-1 pedal.

Hope to live vicariously through you and learn how to turn an analogue noise gate into an expander/sustain reducer, please post about that!

 

[daeg]

Interesting project, but ... Wow, that's a lot of work to make a banjo sound like a banjo.

Well... think of all the things we go through to make our Electric Guitars sound great.

 

[daeg]

Hope to live vicariously through you and learn how to turn an analogue noise gate into an expander/sustain reducer, please post about that!

Yeah thank you. I'm just going to use this thread to journal my thoughts and project. I'm sure others will chime from time to time.

My first inclination is to modify the MXR Noise Gate. It's a classic, so there are a few threads about mods on Diystompboxes, and PedalPCB has a board.

 

[daeg]

Looking at the Muffler schematic, the first idea I had was to insert resistance between Q3 Source and VREF_B; that way the attenuation can never go all the way to zero.



It turns out that's exactly what Mark Hammer recommends, and he suggested a 250k pot.

 

[daeg]

So that would cover keeping the Gate from going to zero... but that's not really what is needed here is it?

What is needed is for the FET to not act as an on/off switch and do gradual attenuation. Knowing a little bit about Vgs cutoff and FET variability, that might be asking for too much.