Musical Tesla Coil

Exodus, Thu Jun 26 2008, 05:06AM

Hey
ive been planning on building my first tesla coil for a few days now. i saw a video of a guy playing a guitar and having it go through his tesla coil and actually producing sound with the guitar. This is my goal for my tesla coil. I just came here to ask. Will it be hard? About how much will it cost? or any other advice. and any links to plans or instructions would be greatly appreciated
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Dr. H., Thu Jun 26 2008, 05:22AM

If you don't have any experience with sstc/drsstc it will be very hard.
The cost - depends on that how big coil you want to make and how many parts you destroy in the proces.
And don't ask directly for plans - you are broking the forum rules.
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Avi, Thu Jun 26 2008, 06:30AM

his name is Steve Conner and he is a member of this forum :)

It should be quite simple really, if you already have an interruptible TC.
simply use a comparator to turn the audio into a square wave and feed that to the interrupter.
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
HV Enthusiast, Thu Jun 26 2008, 01:55PM

Exodus wrote ...

Hey
ive been planning on building my first tesla coil for a few days now. i saw a video of a guy playing a guitar and having it go through his tesla coil and actually producing sound with the guitar. This is my goal for my tesla coil. I just came here to ask. Will it be hard? About how much will it cost? or any other advice. and any links to plans or instructions would be greatly appreciated


Basically, you will need to build a DRSSTC type coil and use a musical interrupter.

For intro DRSSTC coils, check out Steve Wards High Voltage site. He has some very basic DRSSTC coils.

Link2

From there, you would only need to have music "interruptor" "modulator" interface to make music.
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Dr. Drone, Thu Jun 26 2008, 02:59PM

shades
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
HV Enthusiast, Thu Jun 26 2008, 05:31PM

wrote ...

Good day,

You really can modulate just about any type of coil if you are creative enough.
My dad watched a singing arc in 1940’s at the Worlds Far.

Exodus was inquiring about the telsa coil in Steve C's guitar video which was a DRSSTC.

wrote ...

And no it is no easy to make quality sounds (key word is quality at high bit rate)

Quality is not a term i'd associate with prf audio modulated coils.

For high quality sound production, you need to go with a CW based tesla coil, such as a VTTC or CW run SSTC and modulate (either high side or low side) the output. With this method, you can get nearly perfect audio reproduction, provided your carrier frequency is high enough.

PRF modulation on the other hand just makes loud, caveman like, audio tones based on the PRF frequency.

PRF Modulation (low quality, but still impressive)
Link2

CW Modulation (using PWM low side modulation)
Link2

(Of course, the plasmasonic isn't that great in quality because its operating at 300kHz. It would need to both operate above 3MHz and also be high side modulated for near perfect audio reproduction. Sue Gaeta's high side modulated VTTC does an excellent job at this, although her was still operating under 3mHz so you still have that hissing sound)
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Dr. Drone, Thu Jun 26 2008, 07:09PM

shades
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
HV Enthusiast, Fri Jun 27 2008, 10:49AM

Not sure what you mean by "bit rates" here. Can you expand on what this means?
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Patriot, Fri Jun 27 2008, 04:08PM

In digital multimedia, bit rate often refers to the number of bits used per unit of playback time to represent a continuous medium such as audio or video after source coding. (as referenced in wikipedia) Usually as the bitrate goes up the music tends to sound less digitized and more natural. (I think) wink

Patriot
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Steve Conner, Sat Jun 28 2008, 12:31PM

Yeah, and the point is that that has arguably nothing to do with musical DRSSTCs. (Mine at least is completely analog.)

BTW, I am the guy with the guitar in that video. Yes, it was hard to do. I have an engineering PhD and design electronics for a living. It wasn't expensive, but it took a lot of time and effort.

I'd never have bothered to do it for myself, but I was commisioned to build the drive electronics for this Link2 and it didn't really take much more effort to hook an electric guitar up to what I'd already done.

Look out for something even cooler in September.
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Tom540, Sat Jun 28 2008, 08:18PM

I thought the one attached to the keyboard was the best.
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
Patriot, Sun Jun 29 2008, 02:23AM

Well........I guess that clears it up. Forget what i wrote up above. neutral oh and btw i don't have a degree in anything, and i don't really know about musical drsstc's or any other solid state tesla coils for that matter, and i repair wind turbines for a living. shades I apologize for my inaccurate information.
Re: Musical Tesla Coil
syntroniks, Sun Jun 29 2008, 03:09AM

Patriot wrote ...

Well........I guess that clears it up. Forget what i wrote up above. neutral oh and btw i don't have a degree in anything, and i don't really know about musical drsstc's or any other solid state tesla coils for that matter, and i repair wind turbines for a living. shades I apologize for my inaccurate information.
Hey, don't worry. I'm building my first coil (half bridge sstc). I figure it could play music, but its more of a "death ray" I was challenged to build a few months ago at my work.

It has cost me so far... Probably $30 for electronics, parts (I get a bit for free), $70 for variac unit (I built a case with plugs, switches and meters.

I don't know what it costs to build a SGTC, but I believe they should be some of the easiest, perhaps. I started with sstc because I wanted to learn about power electronics. As for time put into the project? All inclusive, well over 50 hours. Its still not done. I want to make sure the control electronics are ready to go, then I can box everything up and get it the hell out of my basement!