The spec sheet · factory vs canon 9009

The logic changed · what this instrument is now

• Plug in nothing. Amp, cab, board, drummer — already hanging on the strap.
• The room hears a finished sound; the audience path leaves the body already mixed.
• A private feed goes to one ear only — that’s how you aim a feedback note before it lands.
• Drums and a looper ride in the bay, on their own battery. Ready when wanted, silent when not.
• Electric on one lane, a body-heard acoustic on the other. One switch blends or divorces them.
• Tone lives at every stage — per source, two varitones, a solved cap ladder — where the factory offered none.
• The palm runs light, and light runs volume, texture, and the comb at once.
• Feedback stopped being an accident. It’s a note you grow, steer, and end on purpose.
• Stays in tune by touch, even inside a full bloom.
• One take comes back twice — string-heard and body-heard.
• Wireless and battery-complete. No wall anywhere in the chain.
• One cable makes it a controller — Rocksmith, the Gibson app, any DAW: the interface rides in the bay, or take the 1/4″ straight out.
• Desert-island math: strings in, song out, nothing else in the room.

What it was · the whole list

• A very good travel guitar
• One humbucker and a piezo
• Volume, blend, volume — no tone shaping anywhere
• One jack, and a hope there’s an amp at the other end
• Silent without a room full of other equipment

No precedent found — the floor system

No precedent found — the sign and the gate

No precedent found — the phase-in-phase system

No precedent found — one physics, two directions

No precedent found — the optical compounds

At owner-search strength

Unique composites

The coincidental lineage: Lemme’s inverse-square transduction measurements underwrite the upside-down pickup’s reed voice; Tillman’s cascade algebra blesses a corridor order that was never chosen for it; the LA-2A’s optical cell reappears with its curve repurposed from dynamics to texture; and the halldorophone and Feedback Cello mark out the self-resonating-instrument space whose dual-loop corner this build occupies alone. None of these ancestors were consulted first — they were found afterwards, agreeing.

Phase and feedback

Optical fuzz and body listening

Gain and the corridor

Light Whammy and Tini3

Silence, floors, and precedent

Acoustic lane and combination domain

Synthesis and closing

Provenance research · four outside studies, 2026-07

In July 2026 four independent deep-research studies were commissioned to place this instrument in the history of instrument design: what it resembles, what it descends from, who came closest, what it accidentally re-treads, and whether the whole is unique. The researchers were given the architecture and the measurement record — not this site's account of itself. Here is what came back, including the parts that don't flatter.

Honest credit · no ingredient is novel alone

This instrument's doctrine is that every part is a real product re-housed to fit, and the invention is in how parts relate. Given that, naming ancestors is not a demotion — it is the point. Here is the list the research produced, including the one verdict that came back derivative.

Two halves, two ancestries · visible only across all four

Put the four credit lists side by side and something appears that no single study could see: the magnetic half's ancestors are almost all guitar history — Varitone, Red Special, Peter Green, G&L, B.C. Rich, the Jaguar, the wah, sustainers. The acoustic half's ancestors have almost nothing to do with music — accelerometer mounting practice, live-sound gain-before-feedback, room-measurement spatial averaging, plate modal theory.

One reading: the magnetic side was built by a guitarist reaching for guitar ideas; the acoustic side was built by someone solving a measurement problem — how to get vibration off a body cleanly without it howling — who arrived independently at answers the vibration and live-sound trades already held.

What the research does not establish · the boundary, stated

Every "no precedent found" here is bounded by search, not by census — each study says so itself. The patent and NIME literatures are deep and under-sampled; a dedicated patent search could surface closer art.

And the one that matters most: no Busketeer measurement has yet been independently verified. The five-frame spectrogram atlas is measured but is a delta set; the modal ladder and coherence ceiling are deduced; the cascade's dB figures come from this site's own model. The theory is settled and the mechanisms have names — the numbers are not yet confirmed. This paragraph stays here so the boundary is easier to find than the conclusion.

Why you'd reach for it

The sounds you can't get on a normal guitar — and when you'd want them.

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.

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. What's genuinely new, and what each one does to the sound:

The other firsts

Pick your guitar — what each source is for

First, what each of the five pickups actually is; the graph below then shows what gates what — its voice, what it speaks, the rig it wants. Same five sources, the character side of the same map.

Five sources, five toggles — every combination opens a different musical territory. Electric voices, LED voicing, phase and wiring open up as tiers. House presets α–ε snap the whole state, board lights included.

How large is the space

Counting only the discrete switch positions — every toggle, selector and mode, before a single knob is turned — the reachable configurations run into the billions. Auditioned one per second without pause, the discrete states alone would take well over a century to hear through; the continuous controls multiply that many times again. Much of it is redundant, because the gating collapses whole regions — as the graph shows, LED colour goes dark the instant the lane is bypassed — so the distinct-sounding count is smaller, yet it still lands in the tens of millions: five to six orders of magnitude past a standard guitar’s handful of useful settings. The number isn’t the point. The point is that the space is interlocked — the axes bend each other — and a dependency graph is exactly how you hold a billion-state instrument in one hand.

The switchboard — who you are right now

Every flip updates three things at once: the named posture, one line of what it reads like, and the signal map lighting up below. Hunt the trap states too — two arrangements silence the magnetic side, and that is part of the design.

The multiplication — how big the space is

The canonical number of standing voices is NINE — three circuits against three phase positions, the owner's ruling and the only number this site promotes. But between the nine lies a whole walkable space: count every axis below, fold away the degenerate cells the wiring collapses, and about 336 topological cells remain — about 168 in each power personality. They are not 336 "voices" — they are the corridors between the nine. OFF is not counted: it is home, the origin every posture leaves from and returns to. And inside every cell, arm volume, light, and the tone stages are each a continuous axis. In the owner's words: more than anyone can use.

The phase playground — explained by ear

Half the switches above are doing the same physics: phase. So it deserves a plain telling — no equations, just sound. Two sources singing the same note are two waves. In step, they stack: louder, fuller. Slightly out of step, the sound widens and thickens — the principle behind every chorus effect. Pushed fully opposite, they cancel, and what remains is a hollow, nasal residue. On this guitar the two singers are the neck and bridge pickups — hearing the same string 145 mm apart, so they are born slightly out of step.

In phase — the choir

The series pole is unison singing: two voices stacked, the low-mids turning dense and full. In musical terms, this is the warmth of a two-pickup "middle position" — the thick pad under jazz comping, the tone that keeps its weight inside a band.

Out of phase — the honk

The parallel pole keeps only the difference between what the two pickups hear: the shared part cancels, the lows thin out, and a nasal, cutting midrange voice remains. This is the "hollow quack" tradition associates with Peter Green's Les Paul and the Red Special's phase switches — thin on its own, yet the sound that slices through a full band mix best.

The comb — a vowel, not a tone knob

Real cancellation is never all-or-nothing: some harmonics get reinforced while their neighbors are shaved — a toothed pattern, the comb filter. The ear does not hear that pattern as "bright/dark"; it hears it as a vowel: ooh becoming ah is a formant on the move. That is what a wah pedal is — a vowel machine. The SUPER WAH does not sweep its vowels, it selects them in detents.

Off — the choir loses a singer

Cut the neck out of the combine and what remains is not "half a sound": the unloaded bridge opens its top and the voice turns glassy. And every guitarist knows the other thing — lean an overdriven guitar toward its amp and it howls. Here that howl is domesticated into selectable pitch: one turn of the dial changes the set of addresses it wants to sing.

Why phase reads as pitch

Thin the fundamental and the ear hands its attention to the overtones — the same hearing logic that makes a pinch harmonic "jump" a note upward. Out-of-phase thins the fundamental hardest, so flipping phase makes pitch feel like it moves; parked on an off-state feedback address, the change is literal. Phase is not just tone — it decides which voice speaks for the string at this moment.

The pedal family tree — all phase arithmetic

A chorus pedal = a slightly out-of-step copy. A phaser = a set of moving phase cancellations. A flanger = a sweeping comb. Two microphones "fighting" on one cabinet = the same physics wearing studio clothes. Every modulation pedal is doing phase arithmetic — this guitar does the same arithmetic in wood and wiring, choosing with switches instead of chasing with pedals.

The posture deck — meet the residents

Click to flip: the face carries the name and one line of feel, the back the full-rig recipe. Cards marked ▶ can put the emulator into that posture in one tap.

Go play the real thing

To hear all of it: Life of the signal runs the full DSP model; the SUPER WAH page draws its three traces live from the same engine; Sources & states explains which controls wake when. This page stays silent on purpose — its job is to send you over carrying the map.

How you play it

The acoustic lane is a set of states, not a continuous gesture — you pick a voicing and a technique and the body does the rest. Tap through the ways it gets played:

Two AD35s, and why both matter

The two AD35 contact transducers are not a stereo pair or a redundancy — they sit in different places and hear genuinely different things. The body AD35 is mounted inside the body near the tuner bays, hard against the wood, so it hears a robust, full, woody sound with real bass — the structural voice. The pickguard AD35 rides on the guard on a Velcro pad, one step removed from the wood, so it hears less direct vibration — a hollower, thinner, quieter voice with less low end (the Velcro’s compliance is exactly why, soft-low-passing the contact). The front pickguard mic leans air and percussion; the back body mic catches the wood. And the pickguard one is playable: press it deeper into the guard and its amplitude rises — more contact, more signal, a depth you can ride.

Running both is not just fuller — it is what keeps the acoustic side stable. Two transducers at different positions spatially-average the response, smoothing the sharp resonant peaks feedback latches onto, so you can crank the gain far harder before it runs away. Strip it down — one AD35, or the piezo alone — and the sharp single-transducer peaks tip it into self-oscillation almost instantly, and it is the bad kind: shrill, squealing howl, not the musical drone of the Tamed Runaway. The AD35 pair is the acoustic lane’s gain headroom — the same stability the contact loop relies on in Feedback.

The pickguard is a percussion surface

Because the AD35s read the body itself, every strike, tap, and brush becomes signal. A kick on the pickguard belly, a fingertip roll on the lower bout, a palm on the top — the guitar becomes a body-coupled drum kit, and with a looper it becomes its own rhythm section, built up under the hands. This is body listening: the surface played as an instrument, not just sensed.

The lanes are not sealed

The most surprising thing this lane restores is what the magnetic side throws away. Drive a string magnetically with an EBow and listen to it on the acoustic path — a bowed, sustained reed-tone heard through the body rather than the coil (the Phantom-Pickup-Bow move). And the quiet things a magnetic pickup is blind to — the squeak of a finger sliding a wound string, a nail brushed across the top — are audible again through contact sensing. The acoustic lane hears everything the electric lane cannot; that is its reason to exist as the twin.

Ten voicings for a source made of charge

The Shape Shifter gives the lane ten passive resonant voicings, and it is designed for a capacitive source — a piezo, whose source impedance rises as frequency falls (roughly 1/(2πf·C), with C only a few nanofarads). That means the ordinary intuition — “a tone cap just rolls off treble” — is wrong here; against a capacitive source the passive networks carve notches and formants (nasal, honk, metallic-cello), reshaping the voice rather than merely darkening it. A second correction from the same analysis: the AD35 volume-off is a true ground-out switch, not a soft attenuator.

Two instruments summed raw

A buffered acoustic-electric guitar keeps its two sources apart with active electronics and hands you a clean blend. This does the opposite: it sums two full instruments through a single passive node and lets them load each other. The bleed is not noise to be removed — it is the sound. The player navigates the cross-load as a parameter, rather than the system compensating for it; the closest relatives are the unbuffered dual-source pickups (Powerbridge in mono, Highlander unbuffered), not the polished hybrids.

The cross-load made a control that wasn’t there

The load is real and measurable: worst-case, the magnetic side loses −3 to −6 dB at 3–5 kHz, with the Slimbucker’s resonance peak audibly Q-damped. But the discovery is the gift — because the acoustic network hangs on the shared node, the AD35 volume becomes a continuous darkening control for the magnetic lane. Turn the acoustic side up and the electric side gets darker. It is a control that did not exist in the instrument until the cross-loading was quantified; the two lanes, wired together, grew a knob neither had alone.

The cross-loading explorer

Each mixer configuration bends the magnetic lane’s response by a measured amount. Pick one and watch the differential against the electric-only reference — the number the paper predicts at each band — with the voice, the music it serves, and the technique that reaches it:

Three things it does cleanly, one it doesn’t

The strip, played by the engine

The figure below is not a screenshot: it is rendered live by the site's DSP engine — the same model as Life of the signal, the same chain mathematics. The three traces are the three poles of the neck 3-way: red = series (the fat voice), yellow = off (the glassy one), purple = parallel (the hollow one). A model still — made visible.

A stepped wah

A wah pedal is defined by a swept resonant peak. Here the peak genuinely moves — just quantized: WARM near 1 kHz, ROCK near 2.5 kHz, LEAD lifting 5 kHz, AIR a broad 6 kHz shelf. Five detents, about 2.6 octaves. FLAT is the experiment's control group: with no voicing on the arm the effect nearly vanishes and the three traces close on each other — proof that the SUPER WAH is the formant against the combination, not a switch artifact.

The poles above are the maxima. Between them the in-between states are endless: arm volume, bridge volume, and light are continuums, each bending the traces between the poles. The switches jump; the continuums glide.

To hear phase explained from the top — the choir, the honk, the vowel, the choir losing its singer — the full by-ear explainer lives on its own page now, with the playground: the Posture Lab.

The actual physics — two combs that multiply

This section states the mechanism in the vocabulary the physics already has, and labels what is measured against what is deduced. After four rounds of outside provenance research, the account below can be checked against published theory.

The instrument carries two combs. The inner comb is made where the neck's two lanes meet at the joiner — one lane through the QTA's active filter, one a bare wire. Summing them, the QTA's group delay is the "delay," and periodic notches follow. Textbooks call this a feedforward comb filter; it is the same mechanism that gives a phaser its notches. The outer comb comes from the 145 mm geometric spacing between the neck and bridge pickups — and its teeth are fixed.

What matters is the order: the neck composite forms first, and only then meets the bridge. Two stages in cascade means the total response is their product, not their sum — the most basic property of a linear system. The owner said it from the bench before the theory was checked: stacked phase systems multiply rather than add.

This has a name: the Vernier effect

A movable periodic structure multiplying against a fixed one is called the Vernier effect in photonics and the moiré effect in optics — the same mathematics under two names. The SPIE field guide to interferometric testing states it plainly: "the moiré pattern is the product of the two gratings." Lord Rayleigh was using it for metrology in 1874. So the "gearing" language is literal: the Vernier envelope's spacing is set by the difference of the two periods, exactly as a caliper's fine scale beats against its main scale.

One counter-intuitive consequence matters: the thinning is not monotonic. In a product, a peak survives only where both combs have one — and coincidences revive whenever the ratio of the two periods passes a simple rational value. So walking the dial should give alternating sparse and dense positions, not a steady thinning. A clean monotone would be evidence against the product model, not for it.

Two hands, two different physical quantities

The dial and the palm are not coarse and fine versions of one control — they act on different layers of the cascade. The dial changes the inner comb's period, hence its Vernier ratio against the fixed outer comb: it decides which peaks survive. The palm changes the amplitude balance (δI) at the joiner: it decides how deep the nulls go. The palm does not relocate nulls — sweep the light at a fixed dial position and the addresses hold while the depths move.

Why depth is bounded has a standing answer in interferometry: cancellation depth is limited by the amplitude balance of the two arms — in one line, a null can only be as deep as there is energy to cancel. Because the total response is a product, the second stage can only cancel what the first delivers at that frequency; so changing what the first lane contributes changes how deep the second can dig. That is the formal name for what this site calls the anti-notch: fringe visibility and null depth.

This also gives a decisive and cheap test: added combs move their null depths together and symmetrically; multiplied combs trade them — one deepening while another shallows. The model already shows that asymmetric trade (one null −38.8 → −65.7 dB while another goes −54.2 → −47.7 dB in the same sweep), which is the product's signature.

Stated honestly — what holds and what does not

The theory half is settled: cascade multiplication is a defining property of linear systems, Vernier/moiré is its established name, and the visibility limit is a standard interferometry result. All of it can be checked against published sources.

But the numbers are not bench-verified. Those dB figures come from this site's own model and are labeled deduced, not measured — they should not be cited as measurements until the fixed-dial light sweep is run on the instrument. The acoustic side's modal ladder and ~400 Hz coherence ceiling are likewise deductions. Across four studies, no Busketeer measurement has yet been independently verified. This paragraph is here so a reader knows exactly how far to trust the rest.

OPEN THE POSTURE LAB

The feedback map

Throw the neck 3-way to off — the coil cut from the combine — and the yellow trace shows its secret: sparse, tall harmonic spikes standing to 8 kHz, neighbors buried 30 dB down. The owner's identification (authoritative): these are the feedback positions with the humbucker off — the spectral addresses where the system wants to sing. The bench capture (open A string, controlled conditions) shows the spikes at roughly every sixth harmonic. The address set stands tallest around ROCK and WARM — matching standing canon: off + a standing lane + ROCK/WARM is a repeatable self-excitation state, the ignition seed. The feedback loop is constitutive of this posture — owner ruling: the output switch is not part of it.

The gradual wah — held open, honestly

The light lane offers the continuous-axis candidate: with the photocell arm engaged, light sweeps the blend between "voiced arm alone" and "both arms standing." Both real mechanisms are deduced: the blend's phase rotation mostly changes dip depth (dip frequencies anchor near the arm's 180° phase crossing), while the photocell's corner slides about four octaves with lumen — the big frequency motion lives in the corner. This passage is labeled as deduction: one bench listen (O-WAH) rules whether it earns "gradual wah" or "comb-depth glide."

Phase changes pitch

Owner report: flipping phase changes perceived pitch. Mechanism note (deduced): the combination re-weights the harmonic series, and when the fundamental thins, virtual pitch moves with it; at the off-state feedback positions the pitch change is literal — a different address sings. This is also why the posture unlocks genres: one dial changes the vowel, one throw changes the weave, one address changes the pitch — all grown into the guitar.

Provenance — where it sits in the field

The outside study is filed, and its verdict is carried as it came back: a unique composite — not a no-precedent claim. The detented formant selector descends from the Gibson Varitone; the per-pickup phase switches from Brian May’s Red Special; the closest integrated prior art is the Moser-era B.C. Rich complement, which never nests two combs and carries no optical lane. Two ingredients alone returned near-zero precedent: the palm-driven optical lane, and the nested pickup-level phase comb. The combination, all at once on one guitar, is what the study could not find.

A control grays out when something upstream gates it. Open the Sources & states graph →

Show & tell

Physically: the electric lane is the up-and-down pickup pair; the acoustic lane is two AD-35 contact mics stuck to the body — one near the pickguard, one on the lower bout — feeding a ten-position Shape Shifter and then running in series through the six-element saddle piezo. One hears the string; the other literally hears the wood. The DPDT below the bridge picks electric, acoustic, or both.

The electric guitardesigned8 voices

Superbucker

neck + bridge, ~19k

Slimbucker (neck, upside-down) + Red Devil (bridge), in series.

Phase + bridge vol

hollow ↔ full

The phase labels are relative — only which side you’re on matters; bridge volume morphs the voice at constant loudness.

QTA rotary

5-position voicing

FLAT = Bypass · AIR = Light Tone · LEAD = High Peak · ROCK = Mid Peak · WARM = Low Peak. The light lane rides the QTA's power, not its dial — any position passes.

Light Whammy

volume by light

The neck volume is a photocell set by light — ceiling, swell, and kill on one palm surface.

King Tone

resonant-peak switch

A 6-position rotary that moves the Red Devil's resonant peak: 0 off · 1 TB · 2 Jimi · 3 SRV · 4 Albert King · 5 BB King. Position 1 (TB) is the configurable setting.

King Tone ⇄ Shape Shifter. Summed, the two reactive switches load each other — the cross-load bridge, −2.5 dB at 3 kHz.

The acoustic guitardiscovered10 body voices

AD35 ×2 + piezo

contact + saddle

Two body-contact pickups spatially averaged, plus an under-saddle piezo.

Shape Shifter

body voicing

A 10-position rotary that shifts the resonant peak, revoicing a bright pickup from warmer single-coil (positions 2–3) through P90 and humbucker (4–7) to an extreme "woman tone" (8–10). Position 1 is bypass.

Piezo tone

body weight

A 0.05µF capacitive divider — a body-weight control, not a treble roll-off.

The acoustic side is played with fingerstyle, pickguard taps, or a Velcro-mounted shaker driving the body continuously — the same body the speaker feeds back into.

into the corridor →

Each lane also carries its own passive voicing network — the King Tone rotary, the Shape Shifter varitone, and the second AD35's wiring — none of them a plain tone knob. Those get their own page: The voicing networks →

The percussion deck · the sliding pickguard

A Gibson-pattern pickguard, made slidable on the body — and turned into a drum. One AD-35 is Velcroed to the guard; the transducer's own face carries more Velcro, so a bottle cap mounts for clank or a finger shaker for shake. That stacks three very different tappable voices in one hand-span — the guard's Velcro field, its hard face, and the transducer's cap-or-shaker top — all entering the acoustic side of the chain like any other body signal. The guard rides friction rails — slide it up the body when hard cowboy strumming needs room, drop it (it's tethered), park it anywhere the Velcro field reaches so the transducer samples wherever the sound lives; it lifts off to reach the tuners.

Which makes percussion a full citizen: run the shaker through the Muff and the whole corridor, then out the iRig or the Pulze. Busket is a percussive instrument that happens to have strings attached.

The two ears · deck and parlor

The two AD-35s hear different instruments. The deck mic rides the sliding pickguard — Velcro on plastic, friction-coupled, so much of the wood's energy never arrives: what it hears is air, taps, and the cap-or-shaker voices. The parlor mic is taped flat to the back near the body's center, beside the tuners, for maximum transfer — the mode-rich zone where the wood really moves: it hears the wood itself, the in-body resonant voice, the mode ladder humming. The 八七 cap parks on its face for storage and deploys to the front deck when percussion calls.

Together they do a third job. The joint loading rolls the top off (−1.5/−4/−5 dB at 1/3/5 kHz), and that is anti-feedback armor: acoustic-side feedback is shrill and near-instantaneous — the research paper's verdict is that you cannot play with it — so both-on takes away exactly the highs it needs to grab. More headroom, by subtraction.

Cross-play · the interoperability doctrine

Because the signal can split and divert at every junction, the two sides can be played against each other's sensors. Excite the strings magnetically with the EBow — but listen only through the acoustic side: the body hears a magnet's work as wood, a use no EBow manual imagined. The instrument's native sport is this cross-compatibility — any exciter into any ear, any lane into any out. And the cross-load turns Mixer into a preset: voice the acoustic side in advance, then drop the electric into that prepared bed with one flick of the guarded DPDT.

Ten postures · suggestions from the combination-domain research

1. SS6 Cross-Domain Honk — reed-class phase mode + WARM + both AD35 max + SS6: the muted-brass voice, reachable nowhere else.
2. Halldorophone-adjacent drone — M5 Pure Light + AD35 max + SS1 + body excitation: LDR breath over a body anchor.
3. Viola da gamba — M6 Pure Modulation IP + WARM + AD35 max + SS1: bowed-with-resonator persona.
4. Cross-rate modulation — fast LDR against an SS position change every 8 bars: nested time-scales.
5. Drone + event — sustained M5 with percussive body-taps: a bed and its punctuation from one instrument.
6. Heavy damper pianissimo — Mixer + AD35 max + SS1 + piezo tone closed: dynamic phrasing without losing phase character.
7. Cinematic anchor — M8 F4 morphs over a held lo-fi acoustic posture.
8. Triple-notch speaking voice — M8 Maximum Whammy + WARM + AD35 max + SS6: the carved-formant multiphonic.
9. Ghost percussion in electric colour — pickguard taps riding −15…−25 dB under the strings (predicted threshold).
10. Layered formant ballad — slow tremolo line over the body bloom: the Frisell quadrant.

The two systems, side by side

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.

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.

The Dark String — a string made of shadow

The same optical surface, run as the second theory: a light beam 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. Select a gesture to see its envelope.

Floors, not walls

A season of measuring settled a rule about this instrument: it has no walls, only floors. Every kill is an attenuator with a threshold — push enough gain and a voice climbs back over. Silence here is not an absence; it is a position, and two controls hold it: light sets the floor at the summing node, and the rail sets the floor of the whole corridor — no detector anywhere, just impedance. What follows are the gestures that fell out of that rule in a single day of play.

The dark string and the light string

One photocell, two opposite strings. On the dark string the optical lane is lit and voiced: light is the voice, shadow is the kill, and the hand pulling away is the classic swell-out — release, departure. On the light string the posture is inverted: the guitar rests silent under a parked beam, light is the drain, and a committed dig into the beam swells the note in — attack, arrival. The exact preparation stays off this page on purpose; the physics is what matters, and it is one sentence deep: a single passive cell sits on the magnetic network's summing node, and the state of one stage downstream decides its sign — with that stage awake the cell feeds a voiced lane, with it asleep the node turns into a leaky floor and the same light pulls the mix down toward it. Same beam, same hand, opposite meanings: one string dies in the dark, the other lives in it.

The new gesture family

The direction of every light gesture obeys one sentence: it depends on whether the neck is already in the mix — a duplicate can only interfere; fresh content can only add. From that comes the dig-in swell: the light-string posture at rest, quiet under its parked beam. Dig the hand into the beam and the note swells in — the mirror of the old pull-away swell, with a guard built into its own curve: most of the travel does nothing, the last stretch does everything, so a passing hand cannot trip it. Only a committed dig speaks.

Three more live in the same posture. The beam-break gate: steady light is a mute, but the mute is electrical — the string keeps ringing under it — so each chop through the beam reveals a note mid-bloom, the inverse of the red kill button. The light-off jump: switch the lamp off and the level jumps by exactly what the light was draining — an accent whose size you dial in advance with brightness. And the entrance: from full silence, turning the QTA on resurrects the lit lane at a level the light chose before the note existed. All of them share one property nothing else on this tap-aware body has: a shadow makes no mechanical sound. The contact mics hear every switch on the instrument — they cannot hear these.

Stage six — 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.

Show & tell

This is a real pedalboard, bolted to the guitar: a booster, a compressor, a Tube-Screamer-type, a Big Muff, and a master stage sharing one enclosure with the five-mode QDD finisher — in that order, on purpose, because each clipping stage feeds on the harmonics the previous one made. The knobs in the photo on this page are the same knobs in the diagrams below.

＋The Pulze runtime — the terminal’s vocabulary

The render stage isn’t just a cab: the body-mounted Hotone Pulze Mini carries a preset system built alongside this instrument — its own canonical track, documented here because the box rides the guitar. Underneath sits the quiet giant of this chain: the preset format was disassembled to bytes and rebuilt as an AI build utility — a writer and decoder that can put anything imaginable back into the box — fronted by a full-featured web app at btg.ren.photo, where every preset is built and fine-tuned. Doctrine: the analog corridor produces the harmonic content; the Pulze is a force multiplier — it amplifies, voices, and IR-shapes what the chain has already made. Its three stable roles: the default revealing-clean render, the force multiplier, and the spatial-wet.

Tier contents are living — preset names are deliberately not mapped per posture here, because the library changes while the doctrine holds. The runtime’s own rule stands: the physical canon on this site and the preset system stay separate tracks; this section is the bridge, not a merge.

Show & tell

The QDD has two output legs — and a selector deciding one of them. The 1/4″ leg is the room’s line: through the bay, into the on-body Pulze speaker. The 3.5 mm leg feeds a left / both / right selector box: left lands on a 3.5-to-1/4″ female — the always-onboard 1/4″ out, pristine and pre-bay; right is the Katana Go — a full Gen-3 Katana engine with its own on-screen tuner: the player’s truth monitor, and a second amp whose output can ride the MS-02 to front of house, independent of the main line; the middle serves both, so the room, the jack, and the monitor can all speak at once.

Another 3.5 mm goes dry to a recorder or a desk. The Enya UHF cuts the 1/4″ cable — and an MS-02 2.4 GHz transmitter can broadcast any 3.5 mm feed to many paired receivers at once: PA, monitors, anything. Every leg leaves buffered — the 1 MΩ booster up front and the Tube Screamer mid-chain keep the taps low-impedance, happy into long lines. Same performance, a different truth at each hole — by design.

The M2 bay — the open port

Between the finisher and the render sits a send/return loop — the retired hard-kill's slot, reborn. Whatever docks in the bay becomes part of the instrument for exactly as long as it sits there; pull it and the loop jumpers straight through. The core never changes. In every photo on this site, the bay is wearing the iRig HD 2 — same footprint as the arcade kill it replaced — a custom-built, full-size kill on its own pigtail, arcade buttons and all (with this many ways to kill a signal, it was redundant; the DIY loop pigtail took the seat). The loop itself is a pigtail with a DPDT on/off and a true 1/4″ send/return: any pedal drops in, or a whole board. The name is legacy — the slot once housed the M2 quick-connect — and it keeps its character.

Two slots, one bracket

The bay now carries two at once. A two-item bracket behind the speaker holds a mini-pedal voicing slot (any mini analog pedal; the modded Xotic SL Drive resident, a Disnortion Micro carried alongside) and a utility bay that swaps between the iRig HD 2 and the Lost Tempo V2 — built as one piece that stores on the guitar. Both feed the effects loop, so enabling either takes no unplugging: dock it, plug the loop, flick a switch. Power stays clean three ways — the voicing slot sips a power tap at the very end of the island (a female plug tacked onto the chain, feeding the slot at 18 V), the Lost Tempo runs on its own battery, and the iRig is USB bus-powered. Nothing new loads the signal.

Eight amps in the voicing slot

The pedal in that slot is a small British overdrive whose four voicing switches were sealed inside the enclosure — set once with a screwdriver, then forgotten. They now sit on the panel as sub-mini toggles, reachable mid-song. Same instinct as the rest of the instrument: take the buried control and put it under a finger.

Sixteen switch states resolve to eight voices and two levels, ordered as one brightness ladder rather than a menu — cutting at one end, greasy at the other, three rungs carrying literal Marshall model numbers and the rest named for where they land. At 18 V the ladder flattens: same diodes, same clipping threshold, roughly twice the headroom around it, so the dark voices hold together at volume. It is not an amp and cannot be — no power section, no transformer, no speaker pushing back. It is a shape, handed to the cab that follows.

Power, sovereign

The instrument runs on power islands. The main island is a 9 V rechargeable in a drilled enclosure — charging chip and battery inside, port and magnetic connector exposed — with a built-in on/off and three copies on hand: swap in seconds, the empty goes back on charge. Sub-islands are sovereign too: the QTA runs its own island in its own enclosure, and the QDD runs an off-the-shelf primary 9 V — alkaline or lithium, good for a few thousand running hours, effectively off on bypass — living in a pop-lid receptacle inside the finisher's box I built (the QDD, the 100k master, and the V-Treb: a transplanted pedal).

Charging is one system everywhere: a single magnetic-USB cable, snap receivers pre-seated in every port — touch, click, charging. And the main rail breaks out to standard 2.1 mm pedal power over a D'Addario reconfigurable-plug wire — that's what feeds a docked Skyline. The snap charge points live wherever explicit power lives: the main island, the QTA module, the Tini3, the PWM LED, the MS-02, the Katana Go, the Digit III, the Pulze — the analog parts never ask, the digital ones top up mid-set from the strap's hidden cable. The QTA shows the module pattern at its purest: its own box, its own 3.5 mm in and out, its own rechargeable battery — a low-draw circuit like the QDD, good for thousands of hours — its own snap-charge point, and service is just peeling back the Velcro.

The rail port — two personalities at one switch

The newest power control is the smallest part on the instrument: a printed shell of 13 × 12 × 22 mm holding one sub-mini three-way switch — the rail port. It sits at the supply and chooses what the corridor drinks. The lever reads by geography, no label needed: left points at the built-in cell — the regulated 9 V, the stiff rail, the loud clean headroom. Call it PUNCH. Right points at the electronics it feeds — the old cheap cell, kept on purpose for its weakness: the rail sags, the corridor compresses, the fuzz goes quiet, and the leak that seeds the runaway returns. Call it SAG. Two complete voicings of the same instrument, one thumb apart.

The middle is not a compromise — it is three tools in one detent. Both poles open: a power-domain kill the instrument never had before. Pause there and the corridor forgets its latched pedals — a reset to a known state. And it is the one charge-safe position: with the port at centre, both batteries charge from a single power bank with nothing back-feeding — the rule used to be a habit; now it is geometry.

Always onboard — the rider

The instrument carries its own gig bag on its body. A PolyTune contact tuner rides in-body, fed by vibration alone — all six strings read polyphonically at once, off the signal path entirely: tuning that costs the chain nothing, surprisingly free. A D'Addario Pro Plus Capo stays slid onto the bottom — never forgotten because it never leaves. The Shubb Axys slide and the finger shaker live aboard. And the pick stash hides a few goodies: a weathered Brian May sixpence — concert swag, bought after seeing him; a titanium teardrop; and the X-Pick — the infamous neodymium pick that famously does nothing, except that over this instrument, a moving slab of magnet genuinely does something.

Digit III · hands-free control

An AirTurn Digit III rides aboard, its buttons remapped to the Vidami key set — so YouTube obeys from the instrument: play, stop, speed, rewind, replay-loop. An onboard video-practice control surface. An Apple AirTag rides hidden aboard — the instrument phones home. An EBow lives in its crevice, fitting perfectly — with the slide, one of the two real hand-tools that change how everything sounds. A Fender Fat Finger is pressure-clamped and screwed to the metal up top, weighing the headless end for a touch more sustain; the hang strap is self-cut, super-thick leather, fashioned after the original's — while the playing strap is an Enya MS1 on Falcam Maglink magnetic quick-releases (60 kg-rated, hand-detach only), padded with a D'Addario shoulder pad that hides one USB cable for mid-set top-ups; a second Maglink receiver waits at the neck, so one click reconfigures the strap to an acoustic position. And the whole thing stands on its own — a solid custom base that also holds the M2 bay extension.

Charms and memorabilia

And it carries its luck. A bronze Japanese coin, displayed in a window on the booster's enclosure. The Brian May sixpence. A "Your Mom" enamel pin from a Blink-182 show — riding the overhead humbucker itself. The percussion bottle cap up front — 八七汽水, 87 Soda, Taiwanese. A tiny gold-framed Uzumaki piece — Junji Ito's spiral, painted by AFTA Thirty (@aftathirty), met at his French Quarter shop in New Orleans. The Great Wave — a Smithsonian enamel pin, a gift from my fiancée — riding the neck's inline concentric box. A googly eye keeping watch from the Pulze's red knob. A titanium Lego face along for the ride. The TYPE-00 patch on the amp names the unit — a nod to Evangelion's orange prototype. And the patch that names the whole condition: "You are overencumbered and cannot run!" Memorabilia, load-bearing.

Zero friction — the NFC layer

The instrument is NFC-aware: cheap tags live everywhere a tap could save a step. The Katana Go's tag opens the Katana app. The Fat Finger's tag opens a YouTube playlist — which the Vidami-mapped remote then drives. The Pulze's tag opens the Pulze app. The main power island's tag opens this website. One on the neck, one at the control cavity, each its own function — because stickers go anywhere, every workflow is one tap from starting. Three blank tags wait on the back case for functions not yet invented.

What it does

The Pulze Mini is the cab and power-amp in a box — the speaker of the guitar. Getting a specific sound out of it normally means hand-dialing a seven-slot chain against a soup of undocumented parameters. This tool replaces that with language: describe “warm AC30 edge-of-breakup for fingerstyle, light spring, a touch of compression” and it drafts a valid patch — then builds the actual byte-exact file, in your browser, ready to drop onto the device.

It also teaches. Ask it what a RAT is, what Layer 0 means, what a single knob actually does — and it explains, because the same doctrine that constrains it is the doctrine it can narrate. A beginner doesn’t need to know the byte format or even the gear: you describe the sound, and you learn the path to it. It runs live at btg.ren.photo.

How it got there

The Pulze stores its presets in an undocumented binary format — no public specification of any kind. Its mechanics were recovered empirically, working with Claude: probe the device, read back exactly what it writes, and let nothing into the catalog until it survived a byte-exact check against the hardware. What that recovers is the whole format.

A preset is base64 text wrapping two small JSON objects — a header that names the device and a body that is the engine state. The body carries a seven-slot signal chain — PRE \u2192 AMP \u2192 DYN \u2192 CAB \u2192 EQ/MOD \u2192 FX1 \u2192 FX2 — as four parallel arrays: the chain order, one model ID per slot, an enable mask, and 105 parameters, fifteen to a slot. The order is a free permutation — all 5,040 arrangements are legal, cab-before-amp included. Each model ID folds an algorithm family into its high byte, which is why the two effects slots can share one pool. And because the enable mask is separate from the content, a slot can ship fully voiced yet switched off — pre-dialed for the moment you bring it in.

Encoding edge cases

The intricacies are where the format resists you. A delay\u2019s Time is dual-encoded \u2014 the same position holds either milliseconds or a rhythmic division, told apart by a hidden sync byte. \u201cOff\u201d is a sentinel parked just past the legal range: a cabinet\u2019s low cut sweeps to 2 kHz and switches off at the value 19, its high cut runs to 20 kHz and off at 20001. Some positions are engine-only \u2014 read by the DSP, bound to no knob \u2014 so zeroing them quietly changes the sound. And the firmware never clears unused positions on a model change, so any preset pulled from the wild carries leftover bytes from whatever preceded it. Only a fresh factory capture is default-value truth.

Mapped end to end \u2014 191 factory effects, 52 amp models, every knob\u2019s position and encoding and range and default, the routing grammar, the sanitization behavior \u2014 the whole device becomes legal material, and any tone can be composed byte-exact from first principles, without a factory preset to imitate.

The doctrine the AI reasons through

The generator isn’t a generic preset maker. It carries a written doctrine — the analog-first rules of this specific instrument — as its context, and composes within them. Two toggles gate it, default both on: Busket Doctrine (the analog-first composition rules) and Layer 0 (the curated content on the device). The core rule is subtraction: the digital chain never duplicates what the analog corridor already does. No digital Tube Screamer — the Cicada is already there. No digital Muff — the Earwig is there. No digital compressor — the Pillbug is there. The first question the AI always asks is: does Busket’s analog already do this? If yes, the slot stays off and loads something the corridor can’t provide.

Layer 0 — the captures

Layer 0 is the curated content loaded onto the device: ten NAM amp captures and twenty Custom IR cabinets (York Audio). The selection tells the whole story — every capture was chosen clean to edge-of-breakup, not a single high-gain one, because the corridor supplies the saturation. The NAM provides the amp’s voicing and power-amp character; the IR provides the cabinet. The gain is already made, upstream, in analog. The captures only have to render it.

The collection — every capture

The complete Layer 0 loadout on the device, so you can see exactly what’s aboard. Every NAM is a clean-to-edge-of-breakup amp voicing — no high-gain captures, because the corridor makes the gain — paired against a York Audio cabinet IR.

The four postures

The library the tool builds is organised into four postures — four ways to point at a sound. They aren’t a menu of settings; they’re four different intentions, and the pool of amps deliberately tightens as you move across them. Tap through:

Why digital, here, is the right call

It’s fair to ask why a sovereign analog instrument ends in a digital box at all. The answer is the whole thesis — and it isn’t a compromise.

The harmonics are already made. By the time the signal reaches the Pulze it has passed through five to seven analog stages — boost, compression, overdrive, fuzz, terminal clip. All the nonlinear, dynamic, harmonic work — the part that has to happen live, in a continuous path where digitising would introduce latency and aliasing into a loop that must stay unbroken — has already happened, in analog. What’s left for the Pulze is fixed voicing: a cabinet, and a power-amp colour.

Fixed voicing, and where digital belongs

And fixed voicing is exactly the problem digital has already solved. A cab impulse response is a convolution with a fixed filter; a NAM amp capture is a trained static model of a fixed voicing. Neither requires per-sample nonlinear recomputation inside a feedback loop — there is no dynamic quantisation maths running in a path that has to stay continuous. A capture reproduces a fixed voicing transparently, and black-box modelling is mature and effectively solved precisely for this — cabs and amp/power sections — where the thing being modelled doesn’t change moment to moment.

So the design isn’t settling for digital. It puts digital exactly where it is best-in-class — faithful reproduction of a fixed voicing — and keeps analog exactly where it is irreplaceable — live, nonlinear harmonic generation and the feedback-critical paths. Analog where the nonlinearity and the feedback live; digital where the fixed voicing lives. The Pulze doesn’t make the tone. It gives an already harmonically-rich signal a room and a cabinet — and this tool is how you tell it which room, in words.

The dual floor system

The runaway's return is one half of a larger architecture. This instrument holds its quiet with two floors and no detector: the node floor — light tying the magnetic summing node toward a leaky ground — and the rail floor — the supply's own impedance deciding where the whole corridor's silence sits and how hard its ceiling pushes back. Both are held by raw impedance; neither measures anything. Controlled Runaway is what the pair makes selectable: one throw drops the rail floor, the corridor's margins close inward until feedback has an address, and the node floor still chooses which voices stand above the quiet when it arrives. Below either floor nothing is deleted — everything is standing inventory, recoverable by gain, by light, or by one throw of the rail.

The optical throttle — playing the runaway

Feedback obeys one condition: it takes hold at any frequency where the loop gain stays above unity — where the sound coming back is at least as loud as the sound that made it. Below that line a note decays; above it, the note feeds itself and grows without end. The LDR sits in the electric signal path as an optical volume control, which makes it the throttle on that loop gain. Pluck a note and open the light lane and the loop crosses unity — the note refuses to die and settles into a standing drone. Ease the light back toward the balance point, near one lumen, and it holds right at the ridge; close it and the note decays as normal.

That is the whole transformation. Left alone, this is a guitar with ordinary short sustain. With the optical lane as a throttle, any note can be pushed into self-sustaining feedback on demand — no external EBow required; the trigger is onboard, played by hand and shadow over the light. The strings act as bandpass filters, so the drone only holds on tuned harmonics — it sings rather than howls. And to be clear which loop this is: it is the electric one, the magnetic pickups reading the strings the speaker drives through the air — not the contact/acoustic lane. Runaway, tamed into a voice.

The pristine paradox

The 1/4″ out splits at the QDD — before the bay, the Skylines, the render. Yet in the Tamed Runaway that early tap still carries the finished, sustained voice: the onboard speaker has already pressed the whole downstream character into the strings, and the pickups read it back at the top of the chain. The loop launders the entire rig's sound into a pre-bay output — infinite sustain, delivered pristine.

Drone mode

Set the Tamed Runaway to hold and one note rings on its own; turn an overdrive against that standing tone and every knob answers immediately, against a fixed reference the instrument itself supplies. It becomes a whole playground — and, held long enough, a meditative one.

What he had found has a name: the drone is a distortion microscope. Because it holds one fixed, sustained pitch, it becomes a standing reference — turn any knob in the corridor and that stage’s effect on the harmonics is audible in real time, against a tone that isn’t moving. It is the gain-microscope of the terminal drive (see The QDD) made continuous and hands-free: not a note you inspect once as it decays, but one you hold open and study.

The runaway that died, and came back

An older mode, and for a season a lost one. On a cheap lithium 9 V cell — every volume closed, optical lane dark — a thin signal still leaked through, and it was played rather than fixed: open the light against that seed and it heated into a self-sustaining note, landing on the fundamental or on a harmonic according to where the hand sat on the neck. The Controlled Runaway. An A/B/A/B swap settled it — dirty cell, clean bank, dirty cell, current battery. The mode returned both times the bad cell did. It belonged to the battery, not the guitar.

The physics, and the successor

A cheap cell behind a boost converter has real impedance at audio frequencies, and every active stage leans on that rail. With the intended paths closed, signal crossed through the supply itself — an unintended summing point. A stiff supply shorts that route away, so the repair and the loss were one event. But the repair had a second half on the bill: the stiff supply also raised the noise floor of the fuzz, and the mode had only ever been controllable because its seed sat above a quiet floor. Two properties died together — the leak that seeded it, and the hush that made it playable.

The return

It stayed history until the rail grew a port — a thumb-reach selector at the supply, with the old cheap cell waiting on its far throw. Flick right and the mode returns whole: volumes closed, lane dark, open the light, and the note heats and holds exactly as it did. The instrument was never opened, and the supply was never made bad again — the bad supply was made selectable. Controlled Runaway is a switch position now. The successor stays deliberate all the same: a little bridge volume passing as the seed, gated by light, ignited by opening the lane.

Sources & pickups

Voicing & switching

The optical system

The corridor & the finisher

Engines & the bay

Outputs & wireless

Power & connectivity

Rider & hand tools

Structure — the printed set

The luck manifest

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 learned along the way.

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.

A full before/after comparison of the stock platform and the finished instrument sits just above on this page.

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.

Every control, explained

Where each knob and switch lives, and what it actually does.

Every box is a real analog stage on the instrument — the same circuits you'd bolt to a floorboard, in the order you'd expect. The three drive pedals reorder because pedal order is a tone decision; the bay takes a swappable cartridge the way a real loop takes any pedal. It plays through the same engine as Life of the signal.

How to read it — the classics, in Busket's hands

The QDD — the terminal drive

The last analog stage before the cab is an Artec QDD, a rotary finisher with five positions: Dry (a true-bypass wire) · Lift (a clean exciter) · then Grit → Crunch → Lead, three graded soft-clip stages that get progressively denser and hotter. Its one external gain knob sets a single global pre-clip level — but the musical result is radically different per mode, because each mode's clipping network saturates at a different threshold.

The Busket idea is gain as a microscope. Because the QDD sits at the very end — after five nonlinear stages, a master, and a treble filter — its drive doesn't just add dirt; it magnifies whatever the chain already built. Turn it up and the spectral differences between sources bloom into view: it is reveal-intensity, not simply more gain. That single fact is why the terminal position matters, and why a $25 board becomes the instrument's last word. The deep reverse-engineering — why the circuit must be what it is, the breakout-pot doctrine, the 100k volume interface — gets its own page.

2The whole rig, mapped

The chain every guitarist knows — here is the same map, with what Busket puts at each stage.

The instrument, mapped · front & back, every organ dotted

The real body, both fields. Tap a dot — or its chip — to name the organ. Orange = front field · green = back field.

12345678910111213141516171819202122

FRONT — tap a dot to read what it is

1Overhead Slimbucker2Red Devil bridge pickup3Bridge + saddle piezo4In-body tuner bays5Percussion deck + deck ear6Runway plate7Light Whammy (clip + funnel)8Tini3 — the working light9QTA cluster10LDR box (bypass/funnel)11KTS + TB12Control plate (concentrics + breakouts)13Kill switch14Bridge toggles (wiring / phase-poles)15Digit III16Earwig17Cicada18Pulze Mini19M2 bay (iRig + Tidbit)20Katana Go21Trinity + base22Shoulder cluster (front face)

1234567891011121314151617181920212223

BACK — tap a dot to read what it is

1EBow crevice2EP2 booster3Coin porthole + AirTag41 Spot doubler box5Neck pigtail (Wave pin)6Parlor ear (AD-35) + shutoff7Shapeshifter dial8Brass slide seat9L/B/R selector unibody10Pillbug11Headphone splitter12Finisher island (QDD + Master/V-Treb)13Main power island14Garage15Leather keepers16NFC tags17Corridor battery box (CORRIDOR OFF)18PolyTune19Finger shaker20FX loop box (SEND/RETURN)21Capo (D'Addario Pro Plus)221/4″ output (pristine leg)23Shoulder cluster (back face)

Five voices, no presets

The voices on this page come from five physical pickups: the overhead Slimbucker, the Red Devil at the bridge, the two AD-35 body mics — two pickups, not one — and the saddle piezo — plus the switch networks that reshape them: a five-position QTA on the neck lane, a six-voice King Tone Switch on the bridge, a ten-position Shape Shifter on the acoustic side. Every sound below is one of those sources through one of those networks; nothing is a preset.

Physics-modelled Karplus–Strong: the string is sampled at the real pickup positions (185 and 40 mm from the saddle), so the position combs are in the sound; the bridge carries its series-coil resonance, and the body voice runs through the measured body modes (~105/200/290/400 Hz) under the 400 Hz coherence ceiling. A model still — not a recording. Tap needs sound on; first tap may take a moment to start audio.

Four years, from zero

March 2022: first guitar — an Ibanez S, HSH, picked for "the most coils possible." The Mod-X followed. Everything after was added from first principles, little by little, for four years; the central spine's final iteration — the stack the lower assembly still rides — dates the build's beginning.

There were no instructions, and no one nearby to weigh in. Playing, electronics, CAD, physics — all worked out alone, from zero guitar knowledge. Nobody said what was wrong, so nothing was ruled out — the absence of critics was the room to grow. That is why this exists. The last chapter is a piece of music; it isn’t written yet.

1 · Platform & neck

The Traveler Pro-Series Mod-X — the only unchanged bones are the neck-through body and the headless tuning.

2 · Magnetic pickups — the Superbucker

Two humbuckers in series (~19 kΩ total). The neck coil is mounted inverted / overhead; the phase labels are arbitrary — only the relative setting matters.

3 · Acoustic system

A full acoustic preamp in the guitar: two body mics for warmth, the under-saddle piezo for top-end.

4 · Voicing & tone shaping

Three varitones, each tuned to its source. Entry points swap at the 3.5 mm breakouts on the parallel connection to layer 1, and the switches cross-load.

5 · The corridor — six analog stages

Gain lives here, in analog only (no aliasing in feedback-critical paths). Stage ① is always first and ⑥ always last; the middle three are order-swappable.

6 · The terminal — QDD modes

All five modes are soft-clipping. Gain is a reveal-intensity control in LIFT/GRIT and a character-trim in CRUNCH/LEAD (the gain-microscope framework).

7 · Optical lane — Dark String & Light Whammy

One photocell reading one light beam, driving two theories. The soft, click-free feel is the cell's own response curve, not a circuit.

8 · Output & realization

Three simultaneous, non-isomorphic paths after the terminal, plus the iPad loop. Gain stays analog upstream; the Pulze contributes cabinet and cleanup.

9 · Control, power & auxiliaries

10 · Signal-path impedance map

Where the impedances live and where the buffering happens — why each switch belongs on its lane.

Glossary — the lab's coined terms

Busket has its own vocabulary; here's what each word means.

The one gain knob does the same electrical thing in every mode — it sets the pre-clip level — but because each mode clips at a different threshold, the same sweep lands in a different place. Low gain is the microscope (source differences survive as harmonic detail); high gain is the mask (everything converges on the QDD's own tone). The white marker is Busket's empirical sweet spot for each mode.

The borrowed vocabulary — what these behaviors are called elsewhere

The words above are this lab's own. These are not — they are the names physics, optics and audio engineering already had. Four rounds of outside provenance research mapped each behavior onto established theory; the two vocabularies sit side by side so that what is claimed here can be checked against what is known elsewhere.

Reverse-engineered from a single number

Artec publishes no schematic for the QDD — only marketing copy and one real specification: 0.16 mA total current draw. That number alone rules out almost every candidate circuit. A JRC4558 (the Tube Screamer's chip) draws ~2.5 mA; a TL072, ~2.5 mA; even the low-power TL062 draws ~500 µA. A 0.16 mA budget permits only an ultra-low-power CMOS dual op-amp — most likely a TLC272-class part (~20 µA). One 8-pin dual op-amp, plus passives, fits the 32×24×10 mm board and the \$20–30 price. ~85% confidence

A luthier's teardown described "multiple preamp stages cascaded." That seems to conflict with a single op-amp — until you resolve it: the cascade is passive clipping networks (series diodes, resistors, caps that shape and re-clip without drawing current). Only two stages are active — a non-inverting gain stage (Op-Amp A) and a unity buffer (Op-Amp B). The rotary switch just selects which passive network sits between them. That single architecture explains every observed behaviour, mode by mode. ~70% on the per-mode diode assignments — no schematic exists to confirm, and Artec likely resin-pots the chip to prevent identification.

It also explains Busket's inverse gain relationship — Clean sits at gain ≈ 8, Blues ≈ 3, Heavy ≈ 2. That isn't a mystery: it's the direct, predictable consequence of progressively lower clipping thresholds across the modes. Each mode's sweet spot is the gain where its clipping is engaged but not yet saturated — the zone of maximum harmonic complexity.

The breakout-pot doctrine

The QDD ships with a 10 kΩ trim in the gain stage's feedback network, and Artec's own docs describe it as a set-and-forget parameter — dialed once at install, then left alone. That framing assumes a static relationship between the QDD and whatever it feeds. Busket breaks the trim out to the surface, and that one move turns a fixed installation parameter into a performance variable:

The 100k + V-Treb interface — why it works out of position

The QDD was designed to sit right after a pickup, before the volume pot. On Busket it sits at the very end — after five nonlinear stages, a master volume, and a reactive treble filter — a configuration Artec never intended and no public user has documented. It works anyway, and the reasons are specific.

A 100 kΩ volume pot presents a Thévenin source impedance that peaks at only ~25 kΩ (at the pot's midpoint) — actually lower than a humbucker at its resonant peak across most of the range. The QDD's ~500 kΩ–1 MΩ input loads that source minimally (losing at most 5–17% of level). The one real risk is bass loss from the input coupling cap interacting with source impedance — but it only bites with both a small cap and the volume at exactly half, and Busket's master typically runs high (lower source impedance), so it stays inaudible. And the V-Treb circuit adds reactive, frequency-dependent impedance — from the QDD's input, it makes the source "look more like a pickup" again, restoring the spectral character a pickup-adjacent QDD would normally see. The net: functionally compatible; the tone differs from factory use because the signal arrives already compressed, EQ'd, and harmonically enriched — not because of any mismatch. HPF below 50 Hz, ~70% confidence

The spine · the drawing that holds it up

The printed parts · the drawings

The printed structures here were drawn in Tinkercad and printed in PLA+ — structure is consumable: parts iterate, replace, and re-print. Bought organs ride alongside, catalogued the same way.

The Light Whammy and its tunnel

The back storage cap

The booster reshell and overhead mount

The control plate and finisher box

The pristine leg

Mounts, switches, and hardware

What is not drawn here: the connective tissue — the tiny brackets, the small boxes with holes in them, the joinery that ties everything together. Those stay the builder's. The showcase is public; the seams are not.