The Illuminated Wesley Guitar
Bob decided to spend his 16th birthday money on a new guitar, and he chose a rather unusual instrument, the Wesley Guitars PE200wh, a clear acrylic strat copy - cool innit?
Of course we couldn't just leave it at that could we? Oh no. You see it's such a lovely clear piece of acrylic, it just had to be illuminated from the inside. No really, it did...
First open the victim
If you're gonna put lights inside a guitar, you gotta see what's already there :)
Here we are opening it up to check the size and shape of the cavity, which is nicely routed, and all the hardware is attached to the frontplate (so no major disassembly required).
Choose your lights
Some rummaging on the Maplin website turned up the ideal light source - apparantly designed for lighting around vehicle bodies, these flexible LED strips are low power, super bright, can be cut into smaller units and will bend round inside the cavity.
To provide a bit of colour, I bought two strips, one white and one blue, and a toggle switch to select between them.
Fitting the lights
After much careful measuring, some cutting and a fair bit of soldering on wires, the light strips can be taped into the cavity like this. Note that I have soldered the strips with the negative sides commoned together, which cuts down on wires and prevents nasty short circuits if the parallel strips touch.
Switchgear
In order to select different colours, we put in a SPDT toggle switch with a centre detent (ie: off). To this we connected the feeds to the lights, and a link wire to the power input, which comes via...
Powered socket
The necessary 12V supply is fed to the guitar via the middle ring of this stereo jack socket, a stereo screened cable and a custom made breakout box on the floor, to which a suitable 12V supply is connected (we've been using an old PSU from a force feedback steering wheel).
Although this works, it's not ideal for a couple of reasons: the pickup signal and lights share the ground connection at the socket, so ground lift due to lighting currents causes clicks in the signal; pulling the plug in/out momentarily short circuits all the contacts on the plug which could damage both the supply and the amp depending on what shorts first. Not good. We will soon be adding a separate power connector to avoid these issues.
The Results
Need I say anything? Just how cool is that? :)
Seeing just how darn bright this is, we are now planning on putting a dual dimmer circuit in the guitar, with perhaps an audio sensor chip (National Semi LM4970 or the like) so the lights follow your playing and/or using the middle ring of the stereo socket to deliver a UART signal from a remote lights controller (DMX via a PIC to the I2C bus input of LM4970 maybe?). Your suggestions are welcome!
