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Electric guitars and tube amplifiers might be. But there is a decently high risk in playing with the grounding on those things. I’ve had my share of grounding
by 52-6F-62 7y ago
Electric guitars and tube amplifiers might be. But there is a decently high risk in playing with the grounding on those things.
I’ve had my share of grounding faults while plugged into the wall or on stage (and that was just with the factory wiring on a 70’s Traynor YGM4). ...ouch
But guitars are simple enough. You can replace components to add new features or change tone and volume responsiveness and even add certain wiring/component patterns to allow you some gain in the internal guitar circuits.
Old effects pedals as well. There’s a ton of modding or BYO instructions out there.
All the analog, point-to-point stuff is easily-enough hackable anyway.
I mean if we’re drawing an equivalent to a car... the relative starting costs might be high, depending.
- tnecniv 7y agoDon't mess with tube amps. If you touch the wrong capacitor without knowing what you're doing you could really injure yourself. That said, there's plenty of safe audio equipment out there to experiment with. Before I got an EE degree, I was building effects pedals in my basement. Regarding effects pedals specifically, you won't end up saving much money versus buying one off the shelf due to economies of scale, but you can make something really fun and unique by yourself pretty easily.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoDefinitely agree! Tube or solid state alike. Both can house some dangerously-sized caps. Guitars are also quite safe and relatively forgiving as you keep the grounding intact. That said I only mentioned amplifiers as the GP was referring to hacking on cars—so I imagine the project wasn’t targeted at complete beginners when they were wondering about equivalent projects. And draining caps before working on them is one of the first things any tinkerer learns—or learns to stay away from.