The Sustainiac Stealth Pro and the Fernandes Sustainer are pickups that can be switched on to act as an electromagnet to cause guitar strings to vibrate continuously, and allow for control of the feedback. For those players who are familiar with the EBow, pickup feedback controllers are exactly like that except they activate any of the six strings on the fly and of course, are permanently mounted. They do work on their own as a pickup, and both brands come in single coil or humbucker variations.
I've had an EBow for almost a decade by this point and love the control that it offers, especially when set in the fifth harmonic mode. Add a delay to that and you'll find yourself floating in the audio equivalent of rays of light. Fernandes tends to market their Sustainer-equipped guitar line toward metal players, but I think it's redundant since a metal guitarist is more likely than anyone to get feedback from pushing the gain on their amps so hard. The simplicity and usefulness of feedback control goes far beyond the headbanging chucklehead looking to create noise; it allows for beautiful passages that couldn't otherwise be obtained.
For the layperson, I promise you know what that sounds like:
Anyway, so, using an EBow is rad until you need to set it down and start strumming the guitar mid-song, which takes an awkward five seconds. A sustainer-equipped guitar will have two small switches mounted on the top: one to turn it on, and the other to switch between natural and harmonic modes. No mess, just reach down and turn it on or off. Pretty damn cool.
...Except that this means a battery and circuit board install are required. Warmoth allows a routing option for placing either one or two 9-volt batteries on the back of the guitar. Sustainiac and Fernandes single-coil and humbucker versions require just a single 9-volt, so no big deal. However, that circuit board could cause problems. I need to know the dimensions of each and determine how to make it fit in the control cavity.
There are two options:
1. Top rout, which is the traditional Strat style and my preferred way to go since I intend to put a pickguard on the guitar:
2. Rear rout, which I'm sure will fit either circuit board but effectively eliminates the need for a pickguard (though I want one):
This is the rout style of my beloved flame-top Jackson SL2H Soloist.
The FAQ section on Fernandes's website tells me the Sustainer circuit board itself is 3" long x 2" wide x 1" deep. The switches are 1" apart and mounted directly to the top of the PCB.
Pulled this photo from a Google image search; it's the cleanest Fernandes Sustainer install I've seen in a Strat-style body (Ibanez JEM).
The Sustainiac's circuit board is 3.75" long by 1.15" wide by .725" tall, so it's longer but much thinner. The switches can be wired anywhere.
Google image search result: Sustainiac PCB tucked away neatly into a section which would be covered by a pickguard. This top rout configuration looks ideal.
It just might work, but I'm already really annoyed skimming through the technical details on Sustainiac's webpage. So much info to sift through. Choosing between the two systems will not be easy.
Why does all of this matter? Because I want to get it right on the first try. Most guitarists who do the feedback controller thing have to deal with a a pre-existing guitar setup working against them. I want this to be the foremost consideration in order to have as little wood carved out of the body as possible for maximum resonance. This post was actually supposed to be about the wood that I would have chosen for the body, but then I got sidetracked.
*sigh* Time to rest up.
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