Do not attempt to file the notches on Ghost saddles!. The piezo crystal is only 0.040" below the notch, and if you expose the pickup, the string will short it out and won't work anymore. Furthermore, the pickup has been positioned optimally in relati
With our insulated Teflon wires (on all electric saddles) the blue side is ground and the silver side is signal. With our black shielded wires (on all acoustic saddles) the bare is ground and the white is signal.
Our acoustic saddles are conductive, yet they do not short the piezo pickup due to the specific internal manufacturing.
You can replace the saddles on your Strat-style Variax bridge with Graph Tech Ghost saddles (PN-8000-00). These are made of String Saver composite material and house Graph Tech's custom-made piezo sensor with your Variax.
The Variax saddles are electrically compatible with the Ghost preamp and MIDI interface, but they lack the plug-in-style connectors on our modular system. To overcome this, order the BE-0511-00 extension wiring harness and solder wires from your Vari
Some Graph Tech customers have tried this with a simple Y-connection and found that the two electronic circuits interfere with each other if they're both powered on. If either is shut off, the other one works fine, so yes, you can run one or the othe
Piezo pickups are a type of guitar pickup made from crystal or ceramic material. The term "piezo" comes from the Greek word meaning "to squeeze." These pickups produce electricity when they are stressed or squeezed, converting the vibrations of your
The Acousti-Phonic preamp sounds remarkably like a studio-quality acoustic guitar. It's downright spooky to hear an acoustic guitar, yet see the sound being produced on a solid body electric guitar. Your eyes won't believe your ears!.
The Acousti-Phonic is renowned for its exceptionally good sound quality. Musicians are often surprised to learn that the mag signal passed through a unity-gain preamp, as they swear it sounds like it's going "straight out". If you need to bypass the
The PC board measures 1-5/8" x 1-1/8". With the connectors on, it's about 3/8" high. Piggybacked with the Hexpander, they are 1/2" high.
You can add a tone control to the piezo circuit, as shown in the user's guide. You can't add a master tone pot just before the output jack. The Acousti-Phonic doesn't tolerate having anything between the board and the output jack because it interfere
There seems to be confusion about stacked pots. A lot of people think they work like the ones on car stereos, where you push in and adjust one pot (bass) and pull out and adjust another pot (treble). These aren't available for guitars. Stacked pots a
Blend pots for guitars are like crossfadersis, where both pots are full-up when the dial is centered, and each one fades as you turn to each side, leaving the other at full volume. A wider variety of sounds are available when you can control both the
This works for two volumes, but not for a volume and a tone. You would have to turn the volume all the way up to roll off your treble. Try a stacked pot instead, which has two independent pots with concentric knobs.
There are a lot of functions wrapped up in the Stereo Switched Jack, so you have to have a good understanding of the Acousti-Phonic to make changes in this area. The main function of the jack is to turn off the battery when no cable is installed. N
The Acousti-Phonic needs a minimum of 7v to operate properly and works fine on anything from 9 to 18 volts. This is a useful feature when you are installing it on an instrument that already has an 18v active pickup system and you want to avoid having
Yes, but you will have no acoustic or mag output unless the Hexpander is plugged into a MIDI converter. This is only a practical option if you are always using the guitar with a MIDI converter, such as in studio or some stage setups. An on-board batt
Yes, the Piezo pot with Mid/Dark Switch is an acoustic pot to blend piezo sound with your magnetic sound, and the push/pull switch toggles two equalization options, a “mid-boost” and a “bassy dark" setting. It provides two-tone options on the acousti
We only stock our switches in chrome finish, but the switch is a regular on/off/on SPDT mini toggle, available at most guitar parts retailers. You can special-order the QuickSwitch harness-only by phone (for half the price), but you may find it easie
Yes. If you turn the acoustic volume down to zero or set the QuickSwitch to Mag, your guitar will play like a regular electric guitar. The only difference is that you need the battery to be good even to run on mag only, as this signal does pass throu
If your battery dies, you get no sound, not even your magnetic pickups. When using an alkaline battery, 500 hours of battery life can be expected (350 hours more than any other acoustic system). This means you will have to change your battery twice a
Yes, but you have to decide how you wil use it, and what's most important to you, because there are at least three ways of wiring dual jacks, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Check out the wiring diagrams page for more information.
There is a quirk when installing the Acousti-Phonic in a guitar with this style of string loading and a Tune-O-Matic style bridge because the strings load through metal ferrules embedded in the wood of the body. The ghost saddles are non-conductive,
The ghost Acousti-Phonic offers 7 string compatibility right out of the box for acoustic sound. If you would like to use more than seven, you would need to purchase an additional summing board (PE-5017-00) and dual connector cable (PE-5021-00). Thi
If you have an instrument with a metal bridge plate, it would be good practice to ground that plate rather than leave it floating because the bridge is a big chunk of metal near the pickups and their wires, which are high-impedance and thus prone to
All of our wiring diagrams depict mag connections at the wiper of a volume pot as this is most common place where connection is usually made, however, this is not always the case. In some case this can be at a switch instead. Just think of it this wa
The ghost Hexpander is the fastest tracking MIDI system on the market and is renowned for being very accurate. It offers the Traktion tracking adjustment to match it perfectly to Axon or Roland MIDI converters.
The Traktion switch is a tiny slider switch that has two positions, left and right. Left is for Roland converters, and right is for Axon converters. If you have a brand other than these two, try both settings and use the one that tracks best.
We only stock our switches in chrome finish, but the switch is a regular on/off/on SPDT mini toggle, available at most guitar parts retailers. You can special-order the QuickSwitch harness only by phone (for half the price), but you may find it easie
The PC board measures 1-5/8" x 1-1/8". With the connectors on, it's about 3/8" high. Piggybacked with the Acousti-Phonic, they are 1/2" high.
Our Hexpander Volume Pot is a 250K linear (type-B) pot. A 250K audio-taper pot will also work, but mid-volume will not be at mid-scale. You may choose to do this, especially if you are putting the MIDI volume on a stacked pot because mixed linear/aud
Yes, you can install only the Hexpander, and you will get MIDI out on a 13-pin jack (hex output, a filtered analog signal). With the addition of the BE-0182-G0 Mag to Pin-7 harness, your mag signal gets delivered to pin 7 of the 13-pin connector. Mos
You will need a little accessory, the Mag to Pin-7 Harness, to connect the mags to the Hexpander. (you do not need this if you are also installing the Acousti-Phonic; it delivers the mag signal to the Hexpander) Solder the green wire on the Mag to Pi
Currently, the Hexpander and all MIDI converters are limited to six strings. There are two popular workarounds for more than six strings:.
G D A E = 2 3 4 5 and adjust the instrument input setting in your MIDI converter.
B G D A E = 1 2 3 4 5 or G D A E B = 2 3 4 5 6 and adjust the instrument input setting in your MIDI converter.
B G D A E B = 1 2 3 4 5 6 or E B G D A E = 1 2 3 4 5 6 and adjust the instrument input setting in your MIDI converter.
Yes. In the standard Hexpander-only installation, the magnetic and acoustic/MIDI systems exist parallel to each other, but are not connected, so there's no interaction between them.
Add the Mag-to-Pin-7 harness, and connect the green wire to the tip lug of your 1/4" jack. This is where the mag and MIDI systems interface.
Many of our saddles that are made for 6-string bridges will also fit on 7-string bridges. If you do not find a 7-saddle set on our Web site, but see a saddle that looks like it would fit your guitar, contact us and we will put together a custom set o
If you have an instrument with a metal bridge plate, it would be good practice to ground that plate rather than leave it floating because the bridge is a big chunk of metal near the pickups and their wires, which are high-impedance and thus prone to
You can connect our saddle leads directly to an output jack (passively), however, the signal will not be very “acoustic-like” in the absence of the buffering & equalization of our pre-amp. In fact we even offer a passive volume kit for this very reas
If you've ever wondered about the sound of the ghost Acousti-phonic, which allows your electric guitar to sound like an natural, authentic acoustic guitar (not MIDI), here's a Brandauer band www.brandauer.es from Spain, using only the Acousti-phonic
Hexpander is not tracking well. QuickSwitch doesn't work properly. When the 1/4” & 13 pin cables are connected, there is only volume to my synth if the MIDI volume pot is set at about halfway. If turned up full, it drops out. Plugging the ¼” jack in
A magnetic pickup consists of a permanent magnet with a core of material like alnico or ceramic, wrapped with a coil of several thousand turns of fine enameled copper wire. The vibration of the nearby lightly magnetic strings modulates the flux linki
Graph Tech's products are all created to be as easy as possible to install. Which means it is the ideal do-it-yourself project. As a DIY project, installing the ghost System is possible to achieve. Although it takes a little more work than our legacy
Here at Graph Tech we pride ourselves in coming up with products that do what we say they will do, and offer a real improvement to our customers instruments. Like when we take our already very popular String Saver material and encapsulate our own (cu
Here is a great older article from the UK about the ghost system. It is a great overview of ghost, and specifically addresses the questions many people have about the benefit of using piezo (Graph Tech) pickups versus magnetic pickups. Graphtech Ghos
Here is an old but great review of our ghost system. It covers both the Acousti-Phonic pre-amp and the Hexpander. It is a great overview of the features, benefits, sounds, etc. Enjoy!. You’ve undoubtedly seen and heard piezo pickup-equipped electric
Here is a great older article from the UK about the ghost system. It is a great overview of ghost, and specifically addresses the questions many people have about the benefit of using piezo (Graph Tech) pickups versus magnetic pickups. Graphtech Ghos
Here's a short (but good) ghost Hexpander review. Enjoy!. When you play a note or adjust a knob on a MIDI keyboard, it transmits MIDI data. A guitar pickup, however, produces an analog electrical current that must be converted to MIDI data before it