Physics of the Electric Guitar

Link is to the index page for the English translation of the digital version. The original German-language hard-copy is sadly out of print now, and included a few figures and explanations that were excluded from the digital copy. The author, Manfred Zollner, also recently released another book, Physik des Magnettonabnehmers, about guitar pickups which takes advantage of recent advances in computer simulations to better model them, but it is/was only available in a German-language hard-copy.

This appears to be kind of a masterpiece.

Try the direct links on this page to each PDF:

https://www.gitec-forum-eng.de/the-book/

He goes into good detail on the magnetic pickups, and also has quite a bit on the vacuum tubes and high voltage amplifiers that go with them.

For tubes a good place to start would be the "Input Tube":

https://www.gitec-forum-eng.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/po...

He starts with a comparison to a solid-state FET, which may be most useful to "assist the solid-state-expert" but the discussion gets less technical from there and ends up recognizing some of the superstition that has persisted to muddy the waters into the 21st century.

I could go a little further on this little topic and it may clear up a little superstition if there is any interest.

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