The complete instrument
Busketeer
It's a guitar built to stand entirely on its own — it makes its own sound, carries its own amp, feeds its own sustain, and gets played mostly while the note is already ringing rather than at the pick. A sovereign self-resonating instrument: one cable for practice, its own speaker on stage.
Signal flow
Trace the path top to bottom — two sources into the lane select, through the corridor, into the finisher, out to three listeners. The dashed loop on the left is the instrument feeding itself. Tap any block to open it.
Overview · what's new
Why it's different
Most of what's here you could find on some guitar somewhere. A few things you couldn't find on any of them — and those are the point. This is the short list of what's genuinely new, and what each one actually does to the sound.
The neck humbucker is mounted upside-down and overhead, so the string sits between it and the bridge pickup in a sandwich of two opposing magnets. As far as I can find, no other guitar does this — and it changes three things at once.
Because the neck coil's geometry is inverted, "in phase" gives the hollow, cancelling voice — the same cancellation trick a Red Special uses — and "out of phase" gives the fat humbucker, the opposite of every other guitar.
A downward pluck opens the gap to the overhead pickup, so the loudest instant — the transient — lands at the point of weakest coupling. The note rises gradually instead of spiking: a reed or sax onset rather than a guitar's snap.
At low volume the two opposing fields nearly cancel, so quiet playing stays clean and linear; dig in and the string swings into the steep part of the field, adding even harmonics. The dynamics live in the magnets, not in a circuit.
The Dark String — a beam over the strings where a finger ends a note instead of starting one. The inverse of a laser harp, and no known instrument of the class.
open Dark StringThe neck argues with itself and with the bridge at once, and the bridge volume is a phase control, not a volume — so one humbucker fakes a pickup selector.
open PhaseNo onboard preamp — instead five famous circuits in a fixed order where the order is the sound, a preamp distributed across the guitar.
open CorridorA body speaker closes two loops, and an EBow seeds them on demand — runaway feedback turned into a performable voice (Tamed Runaway).
open FeedbackA preamp used as the last stage, its gain dialing between hearing the guitar and hearing the pedal — a gain microscope.
open TerminalA complete electric and a complete acoustic summing into a mixer where their switches cross-load — a compositional bridge, not a compromise.
open Two GuitarsThe whole guitar · one page
Life of the signal
Follow one note from the moment it's born. The string vibrates as a standing wave; the pickup turns that into a signal; then each stage of the chain reshapes it, in order. Turn the stages on one at a time and watch the waveform change cumulatively — the same signal walking the real chain. Below each wave, the bars show the harmonics it's carrying.
Each panel shows the waveform as the signal leaves that stage — read top to bottom to watch your guitar bend the signal. The faint grey line in each is what went in; the colored line is what comes out. Tap a stage's header to switch it in or out, and drag its knobs — everything below a change re-draws.
Sources
The two guitars
Two complete instruments share one body. The magnetic side is built from deliberate choices; the acoustic side emerged from the physics of contact pickups on a resonating body. A DPDT toggle selects either, or sums them — where the two reactive switches load each other.
The same architecture, built twice — and two guitars inside each side
Both lanes are parallel-then-series: a modulated source is split and rejoined, then put in series with a plain terminal source. But there's a second doubling. On the electric side the Red Devil in the bridge is a normal neck-model humbucker with an ordinary plucked attack — a regular guitar — while the overhead Slimbucker is its mirror image, so the two summed are already two different instruments in one. The acoustic side does the same with its two body pickups. The electric side was chosen part by part; the acoustic side fell out of the physics of contact pickups on a live body. Slot for slot they mirror each other, and each carries a voicing switch tuned to its own kind of pickup.
Spatial averaging
Two body pickups, deliberately mismatched. They're Adeline AD-35 contact mics, each with its own volume — roll one off and it grounds itself out of the circuit; on, it loads the circuit and warms everything. Each sits at a different point on the soundboard, so it captures the modes for which its spot is an antinode and misses those where it sits on a node. Wired in parallel the two sum like capacitors — lower source impedance, more bass — and their different mode maps average into a lower-Q, smoother spectrum: peaks drop, valleys fill. That directly buys feedback margin (Shure's rule: a smoother response gives more gain before feedback). Same physics as a K&K Pure Mini, generalised to two transducers.
The upside-down pickup
The Slimbucker hangs overhead. It's a Kent Armstrong floating mini-humbucker (Alnico 5, 7.9k) actually built to suspend above an archtop's top — mounted here so the string sits in a sandwich of opposing magnets and is sensed at its weakest coupling point on a downward pluck. Three things follow. The phase switch reads backward — "in phase" is the hollow, cancelled voice. The attack softens toward a reed or sax, because the transient arrives where the magnetic coupling is thinnest. And the excitation is asymmetric, so even-order harmonics bloom when you dig in and vanish when you play soft — touch becomes a harmonic control.
Why the switches can't trade places
Each voicing switch is tuned to its pickup's physics. The Shape Shifter is an LC trap built for the piezo's high-impedance, capacitive source — it carves a sharp notch. Put it on the magnetic pickup and that notch identity collapses. The King Tone shapes the magnetic pickup's inductive resonant peak with RC ladders; on a piezo it has nothing to resonate against and just darkens. So each switch lives on the lane it fits.
Two different attacks
The same note arrives twice differently. The magnetic side is rounded — the coil's own inductance is a built-in low-pass that softens the leading edge. The piezo side is sharp and transient-forward, broadband with a fast impulse. Summed in both, you hear the body's rounded warmth and the piezo's click at once — which is where the bowed-cello and muted-brass voices come from.
Three switches, three curves — and the second body pickup
Each lane carries a passive network that reshapes its own pickup, and none of them is a plain tone knob. Step through the positions and watch the response move. The fourth tab shows what wiring in the second AD35 does to the raw body signal.
Sources · phase
Two phase systems in one neck
The neck runs two comb-filter systems at once. One is internal to the neck — a single coil split into two paths that recombine. The other is the neck against the bridge. Drive a note and sweep.
System B · neck vs bridge
System A · neck vs itself
The Slimbucker splits into a light-controlled path and a voicing path, then rejoins. Same source down two routes makes a fixed wah — the QTA rotary sets the vowel's pitch, the Light Whammy opens it.
Flat (position one) bypasses the voicing and mutes the light path; the parallel-joiner only lives in positions 2–5. There's a back door, though — leave the QTA powered but rolled fully down and the light lane runs on its own (the gain leak).
The neck coil is mounted upside-down, transducing opposite to the bridge. The phase switch reads backward — "in phase" gives the hollow voice, "out of phase" the fat one. The two coils also favour opposite harmonic families, so the flip swaps even- vs odd-order content — the reed trick below.
Bridge volume is the third phase control: roll it down and the voice walks toward neck-pickup-alone at near-constant loudness.
The phase flip changes the order of the harmonics, not just the level. The overhead pickup senses the string asymmetrically, so its waveform is already lopsided — heavy in even-order harmonics (the octave, the 2nd, the 4th). The bridge pickup, plucked normally, is more symmetric and leans odd-order. Flipping the phase decides which of those two families reinforces and which cancels where the coils meet — glassy and odd-dominant one way, even-rich the other.
Push the even-rich setting into the analog corridor and the clipping stages multiply what's already there: asymmetric in, even-order distortion out. That is the vocal, double-reed, sax-like voice. It isn't a patch or an effect — it falls straight out of the geometry: an upside-down pickup, a phase flip, and nonlinear gain. A guitar that, by physics alone, can breathe like a reed.
System A's formant nests inside System B's Superbucker comb. The QTA rotary buffers the neck in positions 2–5, keeping both combs sharp; in Flat the light lane is dead and only System B sounds.
Phase sets the neck-vs-bridge character and bridge volume blends toward the neck voice — one series humbucker simulating a neck / bridge / both selector.
The pluck opens the gap to the overhead pickup, so the attack lands at the weakest coupling — a softened reed onset; soft playing stays pure, hard playing adds even harmonics.
Sources · optical lane
The Dark String
A light beam runs above the six strings. A finger crossing it ends a note rather than starting one — the inverse of a laser harp, with no known prior instrument of the class. One sprung palm surface yields five gestures, separated only by how you touch it. Select a gesture to see its envelope.
Sources · one device · the master gesture
The Light Whammy
One passive, 3D-printed palm surface — a sprung tunnel with a two-disc shutter over a single light-dependent resistor — does the work of a whole pedalboard. No chip, no battery. A photocell's resistance falls as light rises, so the whole thing is gesture read as light: how you touch it and how bright the LED is decide everything. It always sits at 100% open and you subtract from there.
The photocell only controls one thing — how much signal passes — but amplitude is the hidden primitive behind a surprising number of pedals. Each job is reached by a different way of touching the same surface.
| Hard mute | hammer-slam the clip shut — click-free, hands-free, latched (a kill switch) |
| Volume swell | release and let the spring walk it open — an organic, cam-shaped swell (a volume pedal) |
| Sidechain duck | flick a finger through the beam — a momentary, cue-triggered dip (a ducker) |
| Gain / drive | palm pressure feeding the corridor — a note that cleans up without getting quieter (volume-into-fuzz) |
| Tone / comb depth | palm pressure with the QTA on — sets the depth of the parallel-joiner comb (no pedal does this) |
| Phase-mod sweep | palm sweep with the QTA active — a gestural comb sweep (an LFO/phaser, but by hand) |
| Optical tremolo | finger-sweep the beam at any rhythm — the Dark String stutter (a tremolo plus killswitch) |
Five gestures, one move apart
All seven jobs come from five ways of touching the surface, and all five are live on a single sustained note. The moving envelopes are in the Dark String panel.
Hammer-slam, latches silent in ~25 ms, holds with no hand. Click-free both ways — pluck inside the mute and release for a note with no attack.
Release the latch and the spring, shaped by a two-circle cam, walks the level up over 0.3–1.5 s — breath-like, not a linear rocker.
Palm pressure during play continuously inflects the level — coupled to where your hand sits, a volume-knob roll freed from the picking hand.
The same palm motion, heard four pedals downstream: the level holds while the fuzz morphs from gated wall to woody edge-of-break.
Finger-sweep the beam at 1–16 Hz for an optical tremolo with human rhythm — the Dark String. Above ~25 Hz it fuses to a smooth tremolo.
Three voices in the light itself
The LED that lights the cell isn't just on or off — it sets the envelope character. The Tini3 gives three voices, like a pickup selector for the optical lane.
This is what the whole build was aiming at. Instead of a foot per pedal, a single surface is the analog interface — and because a photocell can't tell the difference between a mute, a swell, a duck, a drive, a comb sweep and a tremolo (they're all just how much light, how fast), one gesture vocabulary drives all of them. It behaves less like a stompbox and more like a game controller for tone: continuous, played with the hand that's already on the guitar, and always live on the sounding note. And because it's optical, there's nothing in the audio path to load the pickup — the resistance change happens to a beam of light, not to your signal.
Processing
The corridor
Six analog stages onboard, mostly in fixed order. Each is a known pedal circuit, and each clipping stage reshapes the previous stage's harmonics — so the order is a big part of the voice. But the booster is always first and the finisher always last, while the middle three — compressor, overdrive, fuzz — share one connector and can be reordered by hand to change the character. The guitar carries no separate preamp; the corridor is the preamp, distributed across the chain. Hover a stage for its circuit and its real-world part.
Harmonics of harmonics
Each clipping stage processes the previous stage's harmonics, generating tones neither could make alone. The first clip is the bottleneck — clip gently there and every voicing difference survives downstream.
A distributed preamp
The guitar deliberately has no onboard preamp. The corridor is the preamp, decomposed: EP buffers, the piezo cap and V-Treb tame highs, Pillbug evens dynamics, Cicada voices mids, Earwig adds character, the QDD shapes the finish.
Processing
The terminal — the gain microscope
The QDD is a preamp run as the final stage, with its gain on a separate control. Low gain keeps the upstream source legible; high gain replaces it with the QDD's own voice. Because the first nonlinearity in a chain is the bottleneck, the gentlest stage is placed last. Move the gain.
Output
Realization — three audiences at once
Busket speaks to three listeners simultaneously. Gain stays analog upstream; the Pulze contributes cabinet and cleanup. The outputs are non-isomorphic by design — what the room hears and what the player hears are not the same.
Output · self-resonance
Feedback ecology
The on-body speaker drives the guitar and the pickups read it back. That forms two positive-feedback loops with opposite characters. Both are now performable with careful setup, and an EBow seeds the loop on demand.
Speaker → body → contact pickups → chain → speaker. It runs through solid wood, so it is fast and high-frequency — the loop to manage. The compressor moves its non-fundamental zones.
Speaker → air → string → magnetic pickup. This is the singing, musical sustain. An EBow seeds it deterministically, turning runaway into a voice you can call up.
Instrument
Gesture & postures
Busket is gesture-primary. Light, bridge volume, and phase reshape a string that is already sounding — articulation happens during the note, not just at the attack. The Light Whammy in particular is closer to a bow than a pedal: how you touch it determines what it does, and touching it during play is itself a compositional act.
The working units are postures — stable configurations the player moves between, rather than chords and licks. A posture fixes the phase system, the QTA voice, the corridor state, and the gesture in use; the performance is the path through them.
The first composed work, Five Gestures, runs one movement per gesture class — the instrument's own first language, written to the surfaces the instrument actually has.
Instrument
Identity
Busket is a sovereign self-resonating instrument — it carries its own amplification and feeds itself, a documented class of guitar rather than a guitar with an amp attached.
It wasn't fabricated so much as cultivated — existing parts joined into systems with Velcro, a 3D printer, solder, and hot glue. The work is shaping how the parts relate, not machining new ones.
It's versioned like software. The milestones — 3000, 6000, 9000 — mark not features but what the instrument had become by each one. The architecture is settled now; the work from here is playing it.
Instrument · workshop
Build notes
The parts that don't show up in the signal path — how it's held together, what's been swapped out, and the quirks I've learned to play around.
It's held together by hand. Velcro Dual Lock, a 3D printer running PLA and PLA+, a soldering iron, hot glue, heat shrink. Nothing is machined from raw stock — everything is an existing part shaped into the system. The Light Whammy is a printed 55 mm tunnel with a PLA spring and a two-disc optical shutter; even the amp stands on printed tilted feet.
The light beam is two LEDs and a photocell. A Tini3 up top sets the ceiling — I keep it near one lumen, the balance point between control and runaway — with a Tini2 underneath shooting up. The photocell reads the beam, and the soft, click-free feel everyone notices is the cell's own behaviour, not a circuit faking it.
The hard kill became an FX loop. There used to be two kill switches — a soft one in the optical lane (the Light Whammy slammed shut) and a hard one that cut everything. I replaced the hard kill with a proper send/return FX loop between the QDD and the Pulze. The soft optical kill stays; the loop earns its place by doing much more than muting.
What lives in that loop now: an iRig HD X. It's docked in the base M2 bay, sitting in the loop. That means one USB cable to the iPad — the signal leaves after the QDD, gets processed on the iPad, and returns into the Pulze. Switch the Pulze's built-in amp off and what comes out is the clean, iPad-processed signal. One cable, no outboard box, and the whole tablet is now a realization engine in line with the corridor. Drop an analog pedal into the same slot and it joins the corridor instead; drop the looper in and it becomes a station.
MIDI is one little controller. An M-VAVE Chocolate Plus — three layers plus a rotary, a single master tempo with the drums following by sync. One foot controller for the whole layered rig.
It goes wireless, and it tunes itself. An Enya UHF lollipop (2.4 GHz) sends the signal out with no cable. A Roadie 4 keeps it in tune and doubles as a metronome.
For a lesson, there's no rig. One USB cable to the host, the onboard speaker left flat — the whole instrument, no pedals, no amp, nothing to set up.
One quirk I just play around. The light lane won't pass unless the QTA is on (positions 2–5). I'm not fully sure of the mechanism — it's simply consistent — so I treat "QTA on" as a precondition for any light gesture. There's a back door: leave the QTA powered but rolled all the way down and the light lane runs on its own — the gain leak.
Both feedback loops were tuned by ear. Getting them to behave took patient setup — balancing until the musical loop would sing and the harsh one would sit just under the edge. Empirical, not calculated; the instrument told me where the line was.
The platform it's built on
Everything hangs off a stock Traveler Pro-Series Mod-X — a headless, full-scale travel guitar that already ships as "two guitars in one." The Busket keeps its bones and rebuilds the electronics around them.
| Scale / frets | 24.75" Gibson scale, 22 medium frets, 15.75" radius, 1.75" nut |
| Body / neck | Eastern hard maple, neck-through-body; Black Walnut fingerboard; ~4 lb |
| Tuning | Headless In-Body Tuning System — the machines live in the body, no headstock |
| Stock wiring | Passive: 3-way selector, coil-split, volume / blend / volume |
| Stock pickups | Dual-rail humbucker + Tune-O-Matic under-saddle piezo (the piezo stays) |
Before → after
What the stock Mod-X had, and what the Busket has now. The bones — the neck-through maple body and the headless tuning — are the only things kept unchanged.
Every external component
Nothing here is bespoke silicon — every block is a real, off-the-shelf product, chosen for its circuit and then reshelled or re-housed to fit the guitar. The circled numbers are the six corridor stages.
| Neck pickup | Kent Armstrong Slimbucker — floating mini-humbucker, Alnico 5, 7.9k, 3⁄8" thin; side-mount, hung overhead so it reads the string from above |
| Bridge pickup | Seymour Duncan Red Devil (~11k) — a neck-model humbucker in the bridge; an ordinary plucked attack |
| Body pickups | Two Adeline AD-35 piezo contact mics (each with its own volume) + the stock Tune-O-Matic under-saddle piezo |
| Neck varitone | Artec QTA — 5-position active varitone (FLAT / AIR / LEAD / ROCK / WARM) |
| Bridge shaping | King Tone Switch — 6-position reactive-load switch that moves the bridge pickup's resonant peak |
| Acoustic varitone | Shape Shifter — 10-position LC body-voicing switch |
| ① Boost | Mosky XP Booster (a Xotic EP Booster clone), reshelled, run at 18 V via a 1 Spot voltage doubler |
| ② Compressor | Olinthus Pillbug — OTA compressor after the Ross / CS-2 |
| ③ Overdrive | Olinthus Cicada — after the Ibanez TS808 |
| ④ Fuzz | Olinthus Earwig — after the '69 EHX Big Muff (Triangle) |
| Pedal connector | Olinthus (designer Charles) runs each pedal off one TRRS breakout cable; the three middle pedals chain from a single cable via custom 3× series adapters — which is why their order is swappable |
| ⑤ Master + treble | 100k master volume + PMT variable treble bleed (V-Treb) |
| ⑥ Terminal | Artec QDD — 5-mode soft-clip finisher with a gain breakout |
| Body speaker | Hotone Pulze Mini — IR / cab, audience-facing |
| Private · wireless | Boss Katana Go · Enya UHF lollipop (2.4 GHz) |
| FX-loop interface | iRig HD X in the M2 bay — one USB cable to an iPad |
| Sustainer | EBow + TC Electronic AEON (handheld) |
| MIDI · tuner | M-VAVE Chocolate Plus · Roadie 4 |
| Tone caps | Neck SoZo 0.022 µF · piezo Fender paper-in-oil 0.05 µF |
| Optical lane | Tini3 + Tini2 LEDs, GL5528-class CdS photocell in a printed 55 mm tunnel with a PLA spring and two-disc shutter; 3M Dual Lock hammer-mute |
| Fabrication | 3D-printed PLA / PLA+, solder, hot glue, heat shrink |
Every control, explained
Where each knob and switch lives, and what it actually does.
| Neck volume (optical) | The Light Whammy — how much neck signal passes, set by light, starting at 100% and subtracted from there |
| Neck tone → QTA | Steps the neck pickup through 5 varitone voicings; also sharpens the phase combs downstream |
| Bridge volume | An asymmetric phase control — rolls hollow↔full at steady loudness, faking a pickup selector |
| Bridge tone → King Tone | Moves the bridge pickup's resonant peak (bright↔thick); one position is a mid-scoop |
| Phase switch | Flips the two pickups between reinforce and cancel |
| Coil-split | Splits the Red Devil to single-coil — brighter, and it wakes the King Tone up |
| Lane select (DPDT) | Electric / acoustic / both (a passive mixer where the two switches cross-load) |
| AD35 volume ×2 | Levels each contact mic; off grounds it out of the circuit, on loads the circuit and warms everything |
| Shape Shifter | 10 body-voice notches on the acoustic lane (dreadnought → parlor → jumbo → honk) |
| Piezo tone | A capacitive body-weight control (the paper-in-oil cap), not a treble roll-off |
| Output (DPDT, 3-pos) | Body speaker / private (Katana Go) / wireless (Enya) |
| ① Mosky XP | Boost drives the whole chain; two internal DIPs — +3dB gain and a Bright switch |
| ② Pillbug | Sustain = compression amount · Attack = transient speed (fast↔slow) · Level = output |
| ③ Cicada | Drive = overdrive amount · Tone = dark↔bright · Level = output |
| ④ Earwig | Sustain = fuzz gain · Tone = tone · Level = output |
| ⑤ Master + V-Treb | Master drives the QDD harder (an inverse pair with QDD gain); V-Treb keeps the treble as you roll down |
| ⑥ QDD | Mode picks the finisher voice (DRY / LIFT / GRIT / CRUNCH / LEAD); Gain is microscope intensity |
| Tini3 colour | Cool / Warm / Both — the optical envelope voice, and how fast the kill falls off |
| Brightness | The voicing axis — near-bypass at 1 lumen up to a doom wall at 200 |
| Chocolate Plus (MIDI) | Three layers plus a rotary; one master tempo, drums following by sync |