Allan Holdsworth's HARNESS - SECRETS REVEALED! 

😆Almost feels like it lol

Yeah I need to get one of those... they are so cheap now!

Ha ha not a guitar tech

@@VegasCyclingFreak Don't say that without telling me who then? It's torture!

@@Bob-of-Zoid 😆 [HINT] He plays keys. [/HINT]

@@VegasCyclingFreak Oh dear! He played with so many!🥴

@@Bob-of-Zoid Think early 90s. He's on Allan's REH video. 😉

Yeah, the one in that J Rockett video is what I call the "super Harness". It's some kind of 2 in 1 unit... I think one side is straight Harness and the side has some kind of 2-band EQ, probably a high pass filter and a low pass filter. I just came to another realization today - I think he may have been trying to emulate the "back EMF" of the speaker(s) with the inductors. May explain why there's seven of them. Almost like "inductor limiting". I suppose it can also be considered a reactive silent speaker, in essence that's what it is.

Wow man all this is so interesting to me. I really appreciate all of the work you put in to this video. I know very little about electronics but I seem to have a natural ability to understand how certain systems are wired and I’ll circuit bend synths and effects pedals from time to time. Much respect to your process I’ve Leaned so much. That was very cool when you showed the waves with your handmade wand meter. I got chills when I saw the way it does this pulse width modulation when you bring the wand close to the inductor. also when you show the waves inverting on its self one this video. There too. Out of phase 🧐 it also makes me think pedal made by Yamaha called ud stomp. That is discontinued. There are some presets made by Allan on this unit made up of 8 delay lines set slightly out of phase with one another. It almost sounds like a imaging effect, it’s the only thing out there I know of that can achieve what I’d like to call a sustained distortionless tone. Like multiple images sandwiched back together again with an ADSR quality to it like a synthesizer.

@@ERYKJACKNIFE I bought a UD Stomp a few months ago... I love love love it!

If you do, let me know how it fares

I still need some verification on a few things. Working on it. I hope people don't get the idea that using one of these will make them sound like Holdsworth... just doesn't work that way. Anyway, I just learned about that Altair PW-5 today - I guess it was first on the market? Pre-dates Scholz's Powersoak from what I understand. I sure would like to see inside of a PW-5... one page I found says it has wiggly tungsten inside. More likely it's probably is something like the nichrome wire(s) inside of a toaster.

Had a Harness II in the 90s. I can tell you that it was completely transparent (sorry for the over used buzzword). I used it to allow me to run Tremolux through my rack of effects, and into a power amp, out to a speaker (two 1x12s actually). What it did, was to allow my amp to sound *exactly* like my amp did running without the Harness. Realistic? I suppose so, as my amp sounded just like it would if I plugged it straight into a cabinet (my Tremolux had been cut down and turned into a head). Hope that helps.

@@augustusbetucius2931 Nice. Thanks for the info. That's the version I'd be more interested in for myself if I was going to go down that road.

Yes, except voice coil inductance of 0.1mh-0.5mH is very tiny compared to the 10mH of this circuit. Any capacitance present in the circuit will be from the inductor self-capacitance, and probably a tiny amount from those nichrome wire coils too. It seems to me that he may have been attempting to mimic the speaker "back EMF". I don't know at what level Allan's understanding of electronics was... likely this was the result of a lot of experimentation and what "felt good" to him.

@@VegasCyclingFreak That's very interesting, I always thought it was higher than that. As I'm currently doing a bunch of measurements of audio transformers inductance I decided to grab a 12" 8 ohm guitar speaker. Tested first using my LC meter II from Almost All Digital and only got few uH, great for small air cored inductors but not much for large caps inductors or audio devices. So next I grabbed my digital multimeter with an inductance mode on it and it showed couple of mH, if I loaded the speaker cone with some weight, reading went up a bit but reached about 8 or 9mH if I pressed on the cone with my fingers in order to reduce the cone vibration, as the meter fed what sounds like a 1kHz signal to it. I then set up an audio sig generator through a capacitor of known value (1.5uF) and ajusted the frequency to the resonance and then calculated the inductance at approx 255uH (0.255mH) which agrees with what you said. Have you done any actual measurements personally and if so what method did you use? I suspect that the magnet and steel pole assembly would have considerable effect on the value. Also when the cone is free to vibrate with any ac test signal it would be very difficult to be certain of what is being measured. I remember seeing somewhere in the past that one method used was to pour epoxy resin into the gap to solidly glue the voice coil to the magnet assembly so it can't vibrate. Sorry for all the questions, just my curiosity running wild. Cheers.

...I guess if emulating a speaker voice coil it hes to be without any changes in its operation as if we do, it will not be realistic.🤔

@@markg1051 I didn't personally do any measurements... just rounded up info on various 12" guitar speakers to see what numbers they range between. I think you are correct about the magnet & voice coil assembly. Seems that is partly how they tune a speaker to have a certain frequency response. Your findings are interesting. It seems to support my current theory of the seven inductors simulating "back EMF", otherwise known as counter electromotive force. I guess that amount of inductance you measured is about what you would get from a speaker at loud sound levels pushing a lot of air? If that was Allan's thinking, it could explain why there are seven inductors in these things.

I did one a long time ago. Not fun going up Lake Mead between the cars going 60 MPH in 45 MPH zone and 800 ft of climbing in 3.5-4 miles. The 215 trail is nice to have but it could be a lot better.

@@VegasCyclingFreak: Thank you. I'll search your uploads and find it. Stay safe.

Yeah in later years he did have a few pedals, after the huge rack unit days were over. I meant by my statement that he didn't use some kind of distortion pedal, it came from the amp. J Rockett did make that signature pedal but I don't know that he ever used it. If he did it would have been mostly as a booster. My understanding is that only a few of the Harness II units had the pad switch. "Unsafe" is a relative term. If people are giving you amps that's one thing... blow up one and another one will come your way soon. If you live in a place with an ever increasingly higher cost of living with your pay not going up with it, well then any amp that blows up is kind of big deal to replace. I think it's generally safe if you don't "dime" everything and use it for 6-8 hours straight. You're supposed to use your amp as you normally would. Anyway, I have an idea about possibly acquiring one, or most of one. Will look into that. My circuit isn't built per a verified schematic, so I am reticent to connect it to any of my amps. If I am correct about the 1mH inductors is still unverified. Yes, I believe it was intentional to use seven of them. Thing is when you take an air core inductor and mount it onto a metal baseplate with steel screws and large fender washers, it increases the inductance. So the (7) 1mH inductors add up to 10mH. That would increase somewhat with a steel baseplate. Don't know how much... maybe another 5-7% or something like that.

Did you not see the first few minutes of this video where I showed that the coils being close or even completely touching makes almost no difference? Nichrome wire is dozens of times less conductive than copper wire. Also, I'm just replicating what Allan did in his units. You could slide a piece of paper in between the coils on the real one or my "replica".

Yeah... problem is I don't really have anything that can pump enough current thru it to heat it up. I think it would take roughly 3 amps or so to heat these coils up to 200 degrees.

@@VegasCyclingFreak if you uave a 12 volt car battery and you wind a 4 ohm nichrome coil you will get 3 amps if the resistance remains at 4 ohms, but will settle at something less than 3 amps if the resistance rises which I suspect it will do as it heats up.

@@markg1051 ha ha why didn't I think of that? I may give that a try. Thanks...

At what point is a conductor considered non-ohmic? The resistance of nichrome wire *almost* does not change with a change in current and voltage - but it does change a small amount as temperature increases. Tungsten is definitely a non-ohmic conductor. All of the charts I can find regarding resistance start at 400 deg F with some amount of current in a certain gage wire at a certain AC line voltage. I was trying to determine what, if anything, happens at low temperature of 150-200 degrees, where there is no data available. I don't have a good way to pump 3-4 amps thru these coils.

@@VegasCyclingFreak yes that is my point you would need a much much larger heater the effect it. Goodness only knows how many amps to hear a thick wire like that to red hot 🥵 Maybe in the original design the designer was trying to use that property?...

@@ludmilascoles1195 Probably would take 6-7 amps to get it red hot. In this application I think it would only be dealing with maybe 2-3 amps at the most. Depends on how hard you want to be on your guitar amp. I don't know why he liked the nichrome wire... he must have had a reason. Your guess is as good as mine.

No but on one of his personal units "1mH chokes" is scribbled on top with marker. Based on that I think it's likely that is what he used in all the units he made but I'm still working on trying to get that verified. Don't know if I'll ever get confirmation on that.

what value you get if you just use a DMM to measure resistance? that should be the DC resistance.

@@12afael Basically it's "Craig Anderton method" of determining input impedance - feed circuit a signal of 1-2 volts PTP, change the variable resistor until the voltage is exactly half of the voltage and then measure the resistance across the pot (wired as a variable resistor) after disconnecting from the circuit (that's what all the switches were for on that gizmo I made). Allegedly at this point the impedance and resistance are approx. equal. Towards the end I showed the online calculator thing- DC resistance measured around 10 ohms. Seven inductors each at 0.73 ohms (per the labels on them), one nichrome element out of circuit is 2.7 ohms and the other one is 3.1 ohms. DCR changes slightly every time I mess with disconnecting/reconnecting the nichrome coils. The apparent inductance I measured across the spkr in jack was 10mH. I just threw the phasing thing in there because it was an interesting accident. I came to another realization today - I think he may have been trying to emulate the "back EMF" of the speaker(s) with the inductors. May explain why there's seven of them? Almost like inductor based limiting if you will.

Yes. I'd like to build some kind of circuit that would allow the two function generators to be in phase but that's kinda outta my wheel house.

Need about 3 amps…

Ha ha welcome to the Holdsworth universe

​@@VegasCyclingFreakBlowing my mind....