I had the opportunity to try an electric guitar on my ms20clone recently, and was disappointed with nothing. Nothing being the result, and I was therefore disappointed. Seriously tho, I am still a noob and I realize I’ve missed something. The guitar worked through my opamp vcf (Moritz Klein). Plug in and play no problem. I got nothing out of the ms20. Should I be buffering a guitar before it get to the ms20?
You need to play a key. I think the VCA stayed closed, which is why you heard nothing.
Definitely buffer and probably boost too. The guitar signal is both too weak and of much higher impedance (at least 1Mohm) to be accepted as is in a line input. There are designs for a module that does just that, but you can also use pretty much any guitar effect pedal for buffering/boosting.
So I could just patch it through a pedal first? Like a compression pedal? What sort of schematic would I need to make an input with enough impedance?
I used this from Sam.
But even without my guess is that you should still be able to hear a tiny something
You have several options:
- Use a guitar pedal (a compressor, or a boost, or any pedal that has a volume control that gives you a boost over unity should work, a multieffects device should also work).
- Build something like a stompbox adapter module (see also this version, and a PCB version) that you can use it to boost the signal.
- Build a simple booster for guitar. You can use an op amp, but even a simple transistor design should do as in the classic LBP-1 (stripboard layout here).
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A cheap preamp like the Behringer D120 is a simple and cheap fix, saving you from reinventing the wheel. The 120 is two channel and usually around £20-25 new.
But reinventing wheels is fun!
Well I do have a compression pedal. I use it for my rhythm wolf. The kick output is really weak so it evens everything out. I don’t actually have a guitar so I can’t test it out immediately, but the next time the guitar is around I will hook it up to the pedal and try out the ms20 again. I just added bandpass and high pass. The band pass sounds awesome. I never used one before.