Guitar Preamp

Description

A pre-amplifier for electric guitars. The guitar pickup is high impedance, therefore good quality screened cable must be used between guitar pickup and the preamp.

Notes

Guitar pickups are high impedance and have either two or three output coils. The circuit is drawn showing neck and bridge pickup coils, wired to RV1 which is a a gain control. Switch S1 can select either neck or bridge pickup and input signal is applied to the non-inverting input of a low noise op-amp type NE5534.

The op-amp is wired as a non-inverting amplifier gain set by ratio R3 / R2. Dual 9 Volt supplies are used and output is available across R4. If the pre-amplifier sounds too "bright" then treble can be reduced by wiring a 1nF or 2nF in parallel with R3.