Hello, tappers. Good news! This week, we are unveiling our newest model, the quad-output Mobius Megatar “Nitro” –

ToneWeaver "Nitro" with Screaming-Ghost "Acoustiphonic Sound"

SELECTABLE SOUND SYSTEMS

The Megatar Nitro features two selectable sound systems for bass, and two selectable sound systems for melody.

On the left side of the body in the photograph above, you can see two chrome toggle switches.

One selects melody sound, the other selects bass sound.

RICH BARTOLINI MAGNETIC OR SCREAMING-GHOST ACOUSTIPHONIC PIEZO SOUND

For either melody or bass, your first sound choice is the warm and rich tone of authentic active-circuit Bartolini magnetic pickups. This is the warm, rich sound that has made the Bartolini name world-famous.

But that’s not all, because for melody or for bass, you get a complete additional sound palette … the lush, crisp, and full-frequency sound of GraphTech Ghost Acoustiphonic piezo pickups. The Piezo pickups are embedded in these custom string saddles of Graph Tech’s patented ‘StringSaver’ material –

GraphTech Ghost Acoustiphonic piezo string saddles fabricated from the patented "StringSaver" material

You can *just* see one of the wires at the left side of the first string saddle. The piezo wire is threaded through a hole or slot in the individual bridge plate. Below the bridge plates we have cut a trench, with tunnels through the wood to route the twelve piezo wires into the large pickups cavity beneath the black pickguard.

Also beneath the black pickguard, in addition to the dual Bartolini active-circuit preamps and noise-filtering circuitry, we have installed two GraphTech Ghost Acoustiphonic preamps. These contain additional circuitry which allows you to select the magnetic-pickup sound, or the acoustiphonic sound.

BLENDING YOUR SOUND

In the middle position of your selector switches, you can have both mag and piezo sound, and then the tone/volume knobs act like a mini-mixer right on the instrument.

Here’s a closeup of the tone/volume knobs and dual selector switches –

Megatar Nitro quad tone/volume control knobs and selector switches

The nested tone/volume knobs on the far side control melody and bass for the active-circuit rich Bartolini sound.

The black push/pull tone/volume knobs on the near side control melody and bass for the full-frequency Screaming-Ghost ‘Acoustiphonic’ sound.

‘QUICK-SWITCH’ SOUND SELECTORS

One of the chrome ‘Quick Switches’ selects either mag or piezo for melody, and the other chrome Quick Switch selects either mag or piezo sound for bass. (When you set either Quick Switch in the middle position, then you can precisely blend any mixture of the two sound systems. The tone/volume controls have become a convenient mini-mixer right on the instrument!)

Mobius Megatar quad-output "Nitro" -- The Gigging Pro Instrument

The quad-output Nitro is provided with two mono oxygen-free ‘ClearCables’ made of Japanese Canara Cable with heavy-duty German Neutrik connectors. The cable transmits every bit of the rich active-Bartolini sound and the brilliantly crisp Acoustiphonic sound to your amp, for the ultimate in a voice that’s sweet, and rich, and down, and dirty, and everything in between.

GARGANTUAN SOUND PALETTE

Hear searing solos. Hear crisp choral tones like you’ve never heard them before. Play an acoustic-sounding Nashville sound or a metallic bassline from outer space. It’s all here. It’s all yours.

And for you sound-fanatics out there, the dual outjacks pictured above are actually ‘SmartJacks,’ because if you plug in our mono Clear cables you have bass and melody as usual. However …

SMART ROUTING BUILT-IN

If you choose to plug stereo cables into the outjacks, then the smart-routing circuitry will present you with four separate outputs for the most flexible routing in the world:  Melody Bartolini, Melody Acoustiphonic, Bass Bartolini, and Bass Acoustiphonic.

True quad-output, and outstanding, easy, intuitive control. In your hands.

If you wish to see even more detail of the features pictured above, click on any of the photographs to see a huge photograph with a magnified view. (Caution: dsl connection recommended for humongous detail photos.)

SELECT PARALLEL OR FANNED-FRETS

The fanned-fret ToneWeaver is shown in these photographs, but if you have a tuning that thrives better on standard parallel frets, we can build your Megatar Nitro with parallel frets as on our popular MaxTapper.

HEAR AUDIO SAMPLES

We do not yet have proper recordings of songs using this new instrument. However, the nice folks at Graph Tech were kind enough to supply us with Ghost recordings to demonstrate the startling Acoustiphonic sound –

The instrument in these guitar recordings is a strat; however, the Megatar Acoustiphonic melody sounds very similar. The recordings of a bass are made with the same riff played on normal mag pickups, and then using the Ghost Acoustiphonic system, so you can compare, and discover for yourself the amazing wide palette of tonal colors that will be available to you … only with the Mobius Megatar Nitro.

UPDATE, STARDATE 2009, JAN 30

Faraway sensors report imminent arrival, running at lightspeed, the Nitro Explosion due to arrive Earthside February 1, 2009. And a question that you might ask yourself  –

“Have you Ever Seen $500
Disguised as a Web Page?”

No? Then click here: Nitro Explosion, coming February 1, 2009

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Here at the Megatar World Headquarters, we’ve really been enjoying our new shop. Partly because we have lots more room. Partly because we have a separate room for the LOUD MACHINES!

And partly because we have our own spraybooth, so we can control our finish process much more completely.

I’ve drawn a rough diagram of how it’s laid out –

This photo, taken just outside the spraybooth door, shows a detail of the Incoming Air Filters (on right hand side of the diagram above). These filters keep sawdust and fine dust particles out, while allowing clean air to flow easily into the spraybooth. This incoming soft airflow makes controlling the fine spray of finish easier.

Inside the spraybooth, a powerful exhaust fan draws the air *out* of the spraybooth. There is a second set of air filters in front of the exhaust fan, to prevent a build up of finish particles from accruing to the fan. So, we filter the air coming in, to keep out dust, and we filter the air going out, to keep the fan clean.

The finishes we use are quite beautiful, and they protect the instrument. Protection of the instrument is the *number one job* of a finish. However, our finishes are also eco-friendly. They don’t pollute the air, they don’t create dreadful fumes for us to breathe, and they don’t contain volatile solvents that suddenly explode in a great ball of fire. We think that’s important.

Below is a batch of four Megatars. They’ve come off the computer cutting machinery, and Patrick (the shop foreman) has already smoothed and sanded them, so the contours are pleasing to the eye and the touch.

The two blondies on the left and right will probably become TrueTappers — Eclipse, Dragon, or Storm — and the two dark wood instruments in the middle have parallel frets, so they will become either MaxTappers, or perhaps Dark Dragons, or Dark Storms.

The black paint inside the pickups cavity in the body is a conductive paint. This shielded paint, attached to a layer of copper foil on the underside of the pickups array (when we later install it), makes a Faraday cage around the electronics, to shield them from radio-frequency interference (noise or humming). The green protective tape covers the fretboards of the dark-wood instruments, because the dark-wood fretbooards feel (and look) better with a polymerized oil finish, which we’ll rub into the fretboard in a later step.

The next step of hand-finishing: Below you see Patrick sanding (again) at the prep table, after applying a wood-filler that seals the pores in the wood. This first step helps the finish to protect the instrument.

You want to create a strong barrier against the wood either gaining or losing water vapor from the air.  Wood filler of the correct type, sanding, and then multiple thin coats of finish with sanding between coats still makes the most beautiful, and the most protective finishes.

Below is the batch of four Megatars, each awaiting their turn for the next coat of finish to be applied.

While we are spraying one of them, these hooks keep the others out of the airflow. We want them to have just enough finish, and not too much! That makes for the greatest beauty, and the best protection.

Below is Patrick, our finishing expert, with Mr. Spraygun.

We use an air-turbine driven high volume, low pressure system, as this technology applies thin even coats, is easier to apply very smoothly, and less finish is wasted in overspray during the process.

Below we can peek over the shoulder of the artist at work. The entire trick is a smooth even motion that applies an even thin coat of finish to the entire instrument. It also helps to have lots and lots and lots of light! (Our booth has two natural-light windows, plus three fluorescent arrays, and some incandescent lighting as well.)

Behind the Megatar you can see the outgoing air filters that keep any overspray finish off the exhaust fan, which is mounted in the box-like shape behind the filters. On the wall just below the lamp in upper left, is a thermo-hygrometer so we can keep track of temperature and relative humidity, extremes of which can affect finishes to a surprising degree.

We experimented with several different ways of suspending the Megatar while applying the finish. The simple solution shown here is the one that gave the best results. A thick electrical wire of moderate stiffness is affixed to the ceiling, and simply by threading it through one of the tuner holes, the Megatar is suspended safely and securely.

We’re really blessed to have our nice shop, and we’re lucky to have our own spraybooth. It’s a simple technology, but it’s enabled us to get a more consistent (and more beautiful) finish on all of the Megatars that ship out the door. Protects them, and keeps them beautiful.

We like it!

Like any builder of instruments, as time goes on, we want to enhance the design of instruments, while still keeping the features that have made our instruments popular.

As some will recall, at the end of last year our shop was all taken apart so that we could install machinery for greater production and greater precision.

We’ve been producing our new instruments on this enhanced machinery since February, and now all Mobius Megatar instruments are made in this new way, which delivers more value than ever before.

Here are the new enhancements:

NECK-THROUGH DESIGN

Our older bolt-on design was emulating Leo Fender’s breakthrough, because bolt-on design generally provides more instrument for less money.

However, with our new machinery — which wasn’t available to Leo Fender — we can now create the enhanced sound that neck-through design delivers, and at the same pricing as for bolt-on.

On a bolt-on instrument, any imperfection in the join of the bolt-on neck creates some loss of conductivity of the vibration in the wood, the sound changes. The frequencies most lost by reason of bolt-on construction are the lowest ones.

Therefore when you change to neck-through design what your ears hear is a smoother and slightly deeper or more mellow sound naturally coming from the instrument, as it is now delivering all of the natural lowest frequencies.

COMPUTER-PRECISE FRETS

We now own and operate our own computer controlled (CNC) machinery, which cuts fretslots with precision down to about 0.002″. A human with a saw just can’t match it, no matter how careful he is. More precise fretslots gives more precise fret placement.

More precise fret placement means the best intonation for your music.

DARK ABALONE FRET-DOTS FOR TRUETAPPERS

We have upgraded the dark plastic fret-dots, and we now install abalone fret-dots, on all of the maple light-wood TrueTapper models (Eclipse, Dragon, and Storm).

NEW FINISH

In the past, our finish was so-so. It did a good job of preventing water-vapor exchange, which is the number one job for a guitar finish. But it was not as clear and beautiful as we’d like.

So we’ve been experimenting, and now provide finish which is very clear and lets the grain of the wood show through. [Rosewood or Wenge fretboards on dark-wood instruments are still oil-finished, of course.]

SUMMARY

So — Computer cutting for precision, and hand-finishing for beauty. New abalone dot-markers and enhanced finish. Neck-through design at the same price as bolt-on.

Our website pix are not yet updated, but as of today on our EBay Megatar Store, you can see a Storm and a MaxTapper. So you can see the abalone dot-markers, the new finish, and detail photos of the neck-through design.

(Of course these particular listings could easily vanish soon, as these particular instruments can be purchased at any minute on EBay. But we’ll have more up on EBay, as production permits.)

EDIT: Oops! The Storm on EBay sold while I was entering this post. So I’ll put the two item numbers here, so you can see them for some time after they’re sold. (I *think* this will work.) –

TrueTapper Storm with new abalone dots, enhanced finish, computer fretslots, and neck-through construction is EBay EBay Item #290131836371

MaxTapper Dual with enhanced finish, computer fretslots, and neck-through construction is EBay EBay Item #290135409253.