Tone Control and Pickup Analysis, Continued

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Fundamentals of Audio and Music Engineering: Part 1 Musical Sound & Electronics

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University of Rochester

Fundamentals of Audio and Music Engineering: Part 1 Musical Sound & Electronics

298 ratings

In this course students learn the basic concepts of acoustics and electronics and how they can applied to understand musical sound and make music with electronic instruments. Topics include: sound waves, musical sound, basic electronics, and applications of these basic principles in amplifiers and speaker design.

From the lesson

Week 6 - Guitar Pickup and Effects Analysis MB & Design and Construction of a Guitar Amplifier MB

Building the guitar amplifier, how to solder, getting the amp to work - systematic testing and troubleshooting. Visualizing sound waves, frequency content and tone, signal modification in electro-acoustic systems, tube amplifiers and distortion, wah pedal, talk box.

Volume and Tone Control 10:07

Tone Control and Pickup Analysis 8:04

Tone Control and Pickup Analysis, Continued 7:36

RLC Bandpass Filters 8:37

Meet the Instructors

Robert Clark
Provost and Senior Vice President for Research and Professor
Mechanical Engineering
Mark Bocko
Distinguished Professor and Chair
Electrical and Computer Engineering

And so this whole thing, with the pick up connected to this tone control circuit

reduces to this. Now, I can reduce that a little bit more

and I realize that the tone control impedance, ZT, is just in parelle with

R0. Now there's one little complexity here

that's worth a little bit of comment. We're going to assume that whenever I

connect something to the output, it's going to have a very high impinges and so

no appreciable current is going to flow out the output line.

And so I just have a total resistance, R zero to ground from this point.

So what I've done is I've put R0 in parallel with Zt.

And so this whole thing then is the series combination of the pickup

impedance And then the tone control impedance in parallel with our zero.

And so this is the entire circuit, reduces to this simple thing.

And the output voltage then is this factored g, which tells you the

potentiometer setting. Times the voltage at that midpoint there.

Now I don't think I said anything about this, over here on the volume control

circuit, the total potentiometer resistances are 0.

And will represent the position of the slider with g.

So if g is zero, then the slider is all the way at the bottom here, and there's

no output. And then g can go from zero all the way

up to one. And so the resistance of the, if the

slider is all the way at the top. Then there's, then there's no resistance

from this point to the slider. But it's, it's 1 times R0 from the slider

to ground. So this is just the, the potentiometer

position G. A number that goes from 0 to 1.

Now back to this all I have to do now is calculate Vout.

And that's fairly straightforward. It's going to be V1 and then this thing

is just a voltage divider and so I want the voltage across, the paralell

combination of ZT and R0. And then the then I have the series

combination of ZP and this, so remember the voltage divider equation for the

voltage across this impedance down here, is just this impedance divided by the sum

of both impedance's and I'm putting the G factor in that's just a simple way.

I don't want to draw another voltage divider, but it's a simple way to

represent this internal voltage divider in here.

But this, the net behavior of this entire part of the circuit here is just R0 and

parallel with Zt. And so there's V out, that's V1 the

pickup voltage times the position of the volumen control pot, times This, the

parallel combination of zt and R0 over the sum of zp and the parallel

combination of those, z, zt and R0. So there's the output.

Okay, so again, take a, a few minutes and pencil and paper and work this out for

yourself. There's lots of J omegas floating around

and all that, but it's It's good for you to work through that.

Now let's take a look at what the frequency response curves really look

like. So here again is the, we reduced the

whole complex pickup and tone volume control circuit to this.

And here is the expression we found for the output.

So what I did is, I just put in typical values that you would, say look up for a

typical A telecaster of tone and volume control pot resistances and the size of

the capacitor one would use and and then wrote a simple program to compute the

frequency response or what I really have is just, I've taken this factor which is

a function of frequency. If you go back you know, everything,

there are j omegas and zt. And z pickup has a bunch of frequency

factors in it. And so I can write a, you could write an

Excel program or a MATLAB A program to compute this.

And then what I plot is the magnitude of this factor.

So I'm just going to say G is one. Let's say the volume's turned all the way

up. And I'm plotting this factor as a

function of the resistance. In the tone control circuit.

So that's the variable, it's this resistor.

So, it's not very interesting to look at how things change as a function of, of G.

It's just the whole, the whole frequency response group moves up and down.

there's no change with frequency. But as I change RT, the resistor in the

tone control circuit, the frequency response changes.

And it changes in this way. So when RT is very small.

Relatively small, than the high frequencies are reduced.

And so this is like the base setting, so this is the low the low setting on your

tone control pot. The high frequencies are cutout and the

base frequencies are, are, are still present.

So that makes it sound, have a much more base-y.

Kind of tone. And then as I increase, and I've

increased by factors of two here, as you increase rt, you see that as it gets

large, the frequency response approaches something that's relatively flat.

Well, given the fact that you're hearing increases as frequency goes up, your

hearing acuity increases, and the pickup actually.

The output of the pickup is going to go up a little bit as frequency increases.

the net effect is that you're going to hear this as a very troubly kind of

sound. So so anyway, there you have it.

There's we went all the way from. A looking at the, the collection of wires

inside your telecaster. To figuring out the equivalent circuit to

working out the details of that and this is exactly what the frequency response of

such a circuit would do, okay?

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