Musical Tesla Coil / Tesla Coils / Forums

Forums

4hv.org :: Forums :: Tesla Coils

« Previous topic | Next topic »

Musical Tesla Coil

1 2 next

Move Thread

LAN_403

Exodus

Thu Jun 26 2008, 05:06AM

Registered Member #1567 Joined: Thu Jun 26 2008, 03:59AM
Location:
Posts: 1

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

Dr. H.

Thu Jun 26 2008, 05:22AM

Registered Member #931 Joined: Mon Jul 30 2007, 05:25PM
Location: Bulgaria
Posts: 486

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.

Avi

Thu Jun 26 2008, 06:30AM

Registered Member #580 Joined: Mon Mar 12 2007, 03:17PM
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 410

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.

HV Enthusiast

Thu Jun 26 2008, 01:55PM

Registered Member #15 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068

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.

From there, you would only need to have music "interruptor" "modulator" interface to make music.

Dr. Drone

Thu Jun 26 2008, 02:59PM

Registered Member #290 Joined: Mon Mar 06 2006, 08:24PM
Location:
Posts: 1673

HV Enthusiast

Thu Jun 26 2008, 05:31PM

Registered Member #15 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068

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 1940â€™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)

CW Modulation (using PWM low side modulation)

(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)

Dr. Drone

Thu Jun 26 2008, 07:09PM

Registered Member #290 Joined: Mon Mar 06 2006, 08:24PM
Location:
Posts: 1673

HV Enthusiast

Fri Jun 27 2008, 10:49AM

Registered Member #15 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068

Not sure what you mean by "bit rates" here. Can you expand on what this means?

Patriot

Fri Jun 27 2008, 04:08PM

Registered Member #1507 Joined: Tue May 27 2008, 04:05PM
Location: el paso, texas
Posts: 39

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)

Patriot

Steve Conner

Sat Jun 28 2008, 12:31PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

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

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.

1 2 next

Moderator(s): Chris Russell, Noelle, Alex, Tesladownunder, Dave Marshall, Dave Billington, Bjørn, Steve Conner, Wolfram, Kizmo, Mads Barnkob