Guitar effects pedals

In preparation for the Mini Maker Faire in Brighton in September, we're busy designing and prototyping tiny guitar effects pedals which can be embedded behind a scratchplate.

As this involves hacking an actual instrument, it seems only sensible to keep track of where we've started from (if only so we go back to it, in the event of something going really wrong!)

The ideal starting point is not necessarily the wiring we start with - even really expensive guitars (for us, anything over about fifty quid is a really expensive guitar) can sometimes have quite shoddy wiring. So we're going to start with shielded wiring, to keep any hum and noise introduced by our effects "pedals" to a minimum.

Here's a typical three-pickup setup with shielding - note that the ground plane should be extended to the underside of the scratchplate, the tone and volume pot bodies and, if possible, the entire inside of the electrics cavity:

Shielded Wiring for Stratocaster guitar