This weekend, while trying to clean the pots (short for potentiometers, or volume and tone knobs) I managed to short the master volume pot out completely…. Saturday night…. at midnight… with church the next morning.
Knowing that I needed my guitar for the morning service, I had a momentary state of panic before I decided to break out the soldering iron and make a short jumper to bypass the pot, which would get me through the service in the morning.
While I was in the guitar (a schecter C-1 plus) I noticed a set of wires, dangling free, taped off and connecting to nothing.
I pulled up a wiring diagram for the guitar online and found that these wires were for a feature called “coil tapping”. This feature has sense been implemented into the newer C-1 models, but was left out on the pre-2005 models. It allows you to “tap into” only one of the two coils in a humbucker pickup to give you somewhat of a single coil pickup sound via a “push-pull” tone knob.
Sunday afternoon I went to Any Owings in Myrtle Beach and picked up some volume pots, and decided to drop in a push-pull tone pot to utilize the coil tap feature. The whole project took me a good part of the evening (wanted to take my time and do it right), but I think it’s gonna be worth it. I was able to try it out for a few minutes last night, but something about the wiring in our house makes single coil pickups hum like crazy, and the coil tapped humbucker was no exception. I was only able to try it with headphones, but the vibe I got was something between a strat and a telecaster.
I’m excited to try this out live, maybe I’ll be able to dial in some sounds I never could get quite right before…
We have been doing a song lately called “Know Not What They Do”, and it really beggs for that classic tele sound, and this may be just the ticket.
Got the all the cables cut, labeled, and wired up to the connectors.
The short set of cables feed from the splitter to our monitor console.
The long set of cables feed from the splitter to the house system.
The feeders are split up 1-4 and 5-8, which could be handy if we have to feed into floor boxes typical of many churches. A lot of times they are spread out and will have less than 8 jacks per box. We could set up the monitor console halfway between two boxes and run 4 feeds in one direction and 4 in the other direction.
Next step is to build the rack. It’s probably gonna be a while before we get around to that.
I’ll be sure to post pics of the rack when we get done with it.
Hopefully our idea for this splitter, and these pictures, will help someone who wants to do something similar.
Wiring up an 8 channel transformer isolated splitter so that we can feed a monitor console for our in-ear monitors seperately from the FOH (Front of house) mixer.
The pictures are of the XLR panel which came in friday that I just finished wiring up. Its gonna go at the bottom of our monitor mixing rack and feed a splitter which will split 8 channels into the monitor mixer (in the same rack) and a snake which will feed the FOH mixer (at our church, or any other place we take our gear) This rack will contain the input panel, the splitter, the monitor mixer, the wireless in-ear transmitters, and a power conditioner. A snake that exits this rack will feed all the mics and instruments into the “house system” for mains only.
In time we hope to also replace our microphones with wireless units, and the recievers can be mounted in this rack also.
Got a ProCo MS-82P splitter on the way. I could have purchased this in one factory assembled unit, but it would have cost 4 times a much. We were barely able to scrounge up enough money to do it this way, but the ProCo splitter was purchased on ebay at a great deal, and contains very good transformers.
The leads from the pictured panel will attach to the input section of the splitter via Phoenix Combicon screw connectors, which are on the way. ProCo wanted to charge us over $100 for these 6 little plastic connectors, which were not included in the 2nd hand splitter we purchased. I was able to find the same connectors on ebay for about $25 shipped.
I’m gong to have to create a fanout to wire to a set of the connectors to use as the isolated outputs to feed the monitor mixer. I’ll also have to make a snake which will feed the main console from the 2nd set of outputs (the direct outs) of the splitter. We already had a bunch of cables which only had male ends on one side. The other side had been cut and was just bare wire. These are gonna work great for our fanout, and for our snake.
We are going to build a rack from MDF to hold everything at some point in the future.
I’ll post more pictures as I progress on the project.
Revival at Open Door was truly awesome this week.
Special thanks evangelist John Wishon, he does a great job every year!
John provided the music Sunday night, we played Monday, Chris Stanley played Tuesday, and we played again on Wednesday.
If you missed it check out the churches website at http://www.opendoorbaptistministries.org to hear the archived services.
Recently we unveiled a brand new website layout.
This new design integrates all the separate services we use for blogging, twitter, photos, etc.. into one interface.
We have brought our blog posts up front and center, which is where most of our dynamic content is. The new design also provides a feed of recent twitter posts in a panel on the right hand side. The photo gallery now “works” and is consistent with the theme of the website.
So go ahead and look around. We should have more photos coming soon in the photo gallery.
We’ll also try to get content up more frequently in the coming months.
