While not all guitarists are "technicians" like myself, a lot of us are, and we are willing to put in the time, energy, and discipline, to do DIY projects such as this. However, it seems there's a lot of gatekeeping, loose ends, and fly-by-night startups around this, all of which seem heavily interested in hiding the things they are doing. This page is going to dig more into the TECHNICAL side of creating your own driver and sustainer system.

How it works, is the bridge pickup - usually a high output (10K+ full sized) Humbucker, is amplifed inside the guitar by this internal amplifier, and then the output is sent to the driver, which outputs enough magnetic frequency to induce a Feedback Loop (the driver is basically acting as a guitar speaker without the paper cone) - which interacts with the magnetic strings, which then interact with the pickup(s), causing a "feedback loop". In a way, a sustainer is a bit of a misnomer, these are really "Feedbacker" devices, though infinite sustain is possible with them.

The reason the commercial devices are so expensive, is that they HAVE to produce a "perfect" producvt. Remember, not all musicians are technicians, and not all technicians are musicians. Most of these companies (Sustainiac, Fernandez, etc.) are large corporations that have a scientifically driven R&D Department who have the time, money,a nd resources to design a product that will work 100%, and they know someone like Synyster Gates or Steve Vai is going to buy it at a premium if it works 100%. Vai does not want dead spots on his neck, and he does not want a unit that eats batteries or induces strange oscillations. So most of these commercial units are far more complex than these "DIY Sustainer" projects on the internet and hence their "rockstar" price tags. It's not just the name you are buying, it's a LOT of R&D.

The most basic sustainer DIY project on the internet, is basically a repurposed single coil guitar pickup wound with #34 magnet wire, a Ceramic magnet, and some pole pieces with magnetic properties - wired into a "Fetzer/Ruby" Preamp that consists of a "Valve Boost" via a JFET transistor, and a LM386 OP-Amp chip. This will get you going, but it's not going to ne anything like a $Sustainiac with AGC, various compressors, and signal routing on the board to improve the quailty of sustain and eliminate dead-sounds up and down the neck. Too many would be DIYers go into this without setting their expectations accordingly, and get discouraged because what they just made is not going to do everything identically to a $500 Sustainer kit from a big name manufacturer.

At First Glance, it seems the world of DIY Sustainers on the internet is a real sea of non-information. Hence my "product" comment. A lot of people posting demos of hacked up guitars with repurposed pickups and some mystery amp in them, all doing roughly the same thing - driving the strings from the neck (or even at times MIDDLE) position, and then being somewhat stand-off-ish about requests for information, like we're asking the secret to the Beans, the Coca Cola recipie, the location of the lost Ark, or the Colonel's 11 herbs and spices for KFC! In order to understand, I had to do some digging.

First and foremost, the biggest problem with any DIY projects based on the internet, is you get a lot of people who want a "turnkey" solution - ie. you buy a board, sustainer, and wires, and you can install it yourself from an easy handy guidebook given to you with the product. If you want that, VEYZ and iSUSTAINER have your back in affordable capacity. But if you're going to build your own, in my almost 30 years of building random things from books/internet, I've learned that there's a lot of trial-and-error, experimentation, and creativity can really go a long way (so as long as you meld your creativity with science). To help make it worse, you have the big companies who can always throw a trademark or patent dispute against you if you choose to market something that copies their design, and people who simply can't follow instructions, people who can follow instructions but don't understand YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), and people who generally, are just interested in results, and not interested in the Journey. For those, this page might not be for you as I show my own joirney into messing with Sustainer units.

So I get that they don't share this stuff, but it does irritate me that nobody mentions or shares schematics of their original circuits - which is what I'm going to try here, at risk of exposing myself as the technical savant novice I am. I am not an Electrical/Electronics engineer, I have a grasp of electricity on a way different level than most people do, but I'm still not at the point I can design something without certain parameters accumulated through EXPERIENCE of messing with a certain technology on my own. Everything I've learned - beit computers, guitar, cars, lawn mowers, bikes, what-have-you - has been learned through self-exploration of the subject matter, not through some guy on the internet telling me "no, that won't work" - actually, that's the very thing you tell me if you WANT me to do something. It worked for me to get a 20 year I.T. career, it worked for me to get a Fender Mustang trem to stay in tune....so it'll work for this, and thus far, it kinda' sorta' has.

First off, prior to the Guitari 2600 Project, I had already bought the two best known inexpensive Sustainers on the market, the VEYZ Sustainers and the InfinityGuitarIndustries iSUSTAINER TB-60, with the former costing around $100 (discounted) and up, and the latter costing about $65 and up. Both are good products with different behavior and characteristics, though most people don't know about the latter, and there have been customer service complaints about the former. I put the former in a white Explorer build, and the latter into my first electric guitar I've had for almost 30 years, a 1985 Kramer Focus 3000.

I think a big part of why people have a problem with this project is they don't understand what this device really does or is. So let's get that out of the way first. Both the iSUSTAINER and VEYZ product utilize a circuit board that contains a handful of capacitors, a few resistors, a trimpot, an LM386 Op-Amp, and a Transistor, which I suppose is a JFET like that used on the first stage of the Fetzer/Ruby preamp. Both have drivers that are around 8ohms, built into a single coil pickup frame. The Veyz is pretty wide open and it's easy to tell it's just a cheap single coil pickup bobbin, wound to 8 ohms resistance, taped up, and has a strat cover on it. The iSUSTAINER has a full cover like an EMG and is epoxied so there's no way to tell what is inside the driver. The iSUSTAINER might be a dual driver unit as I can see there are four leads on the bottom, and those leads have to be tied together in pairs to be wired to the Op-Amplifier. That's the recap.

Both work by taking the signal from your bridge pickup directly off the pickup wire, and amplifying it, then sending it through aforementioned Amps, into the driver, and then feeding back into the driver which uses energy being pushed out of it in the form of electro-magnetic energy to move the string - completing the "loop" - which if you have not already guessed, is a FEEDBACK LOOP. Basically, what these simple devices are, is Feedback Devices. What they do is cause your guitar to feedback internally, so that the strings continue to ring, and either hold onto the "fundimental" (ie you play an E note, it plays an E note until you lift your finger off the string), or the "harmonic" (E blooms into what sounds like a combo of notes that sounds really cool, ranging from blooming into another note, all the way to high pictched, wild squealing that's controllable). It's like having the ability to feedback into an amplifier, but with predictable results.

So that's our basic flowchart: Bridge Pickup->Amp->Driver->String->back to bridge Pickup.

The part everyone loves to talk about is the Driver. That's because many believe the amplifier is irrelevant. So let's talk about Driver Construction a bit....

Driver Design and Implementation

The driver is basically built in a similar way to a guitar pickup, except it's wound with thicker wire, #35 as most places state, in about 150-200 turns, in a range between 4 ohms to 16 ohms - depending on your amplifier - with the ideal usually being around 8 ohms.

The Driver can range from basically wrapping wire around a magnet, all the way to a complex assembly with a baseplate, bobbins, magnetic metal "blades" cut in certain ways to promote string movement when the driver is activated, and multiple coils, as many as ONE per string (I might mess with that one later on).

I so far have built three different drivers, and have ideas for two more...

Further research indicates that I should probably consider.