The ShadowMusic Web Community

To complement David's Vibra Artist thread (and because this is a new hosting site), here's the circuit diagram for the earlier Artist model. This uses a conventional ' one volume and tone per pickup' . The Artist guitar in my avatar had this circuit originally.

S1 is the pickup selector. The selections are:
1. Bridge pickup
2. All pickups (in parallel)
3. Fingerboard pickup

S2 is the Rhythm/Solo slide switch

Because the sliders of the pots connect to the pickups, there is virtually no interaction between controls (unlike the Vibra Artist). Being an early (very early) model, this guitar has the offset contour neck and originally had the 1/8" jack socket (which I still have stored away)

(one of the illustrations from my 1966 magazine article 'Electronics and the Electric Guitar)

Ray L

Ray,

This seems to be the same circuit I had in my Vibra- Artiste. It was acquired secondhand and whilst it had the vibrato unit, it was without a vibrato arm- not to difficult to source these days possibly, but very hard in Australia back then in 1967! and there were actually TWO of these Burns Artists for sale in the pawnshop that day!!

At that time, at age 17-18, I mainly used the front and back pickup selector positions (it was nearly all Cream, Hendrix, and Who stuff then!), and occasionally the middle position- when I used to adjust and balance the individual pickup volume controls to get a clean "acoustic" type tone (the odd ballad or Beatle tune) The rhythm switch wasn't used- it gave a muffled dead sound...

Overall though, it was a fairly difficult, complex beast to control on stage, especially whilst singing lead and playing a rhythm/lead style in a "power trio"(!)...and the main pickup selector 3 position blade switch was rusty, clogged with gunk and had no tip- just very sharp edges- dangerous for a quick change of pickup setting!

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be....

So true... nostalgia is just a pain in the face - isn't it? Or is that something else?

Thanks Ray...