Relay Reef Plus

What it is

Relay Reef Plus is Relay Reef with tone controls. It keeps the same pickups and the same lipstick blade, and each voice family still has its own volume. Two concentric pots put a volume and a tone for each side on the two knob positions the Relay body has.

Pickup interaction

Category: Subsystem.

A 3-way blade chooses the lipstick side: neck lipstick, both lipsticks in parallel, or middle lipstick. The bridge humbucker does not go through the blade; it is always available on its own controls. The two sides meet at the output, so any lipstick choice can be blended with as much or as little humbucker as you want.

Each tone is wired to its own side, before that side's volume, but the two tones interact. With a branch's volume full up, its pickups connect straight to the output, so its tone darkens the whole output, including the other side. As that volume comes down, its tone acts more and more on its own side only. Two-volume basses behave the same way.

Controls

The blade points toward the lipstick it selects.

Lipstick concentric pot — 500k audio volume and 500k audio tone for the selected lipstick voice.

Humbucker concentric pot — 500k audio volume and 500k audio tone for the bridge humbucker.

We suggest the upper knob of each concentric pot for volume and the lower knob for tone. The wiring works either way.

How it behaves

Relay Reef Plus has not been built yet. The voice descriptions come from the Coupeville Reef prototype, which uses the same branch layout with a three-way selector, 1 MΩ linear volumes, one master tone, and a different bridge humbucker.

The bridge humbucker gives Reef its heavier voice: a thick, sustaining counterweight for driven sounds and for pushing an amp. The lipsticks provide the separate clean family, bright and open, with the two together as the widest, glassiest sound. With both volumes up, either tone works like a master tone. With one side turned down to sit under the other, that side's tone shapes mostly that side.

Reef Plus uses stock 500k audio-taper concentric pots, not the 1 MΩ linear volumes of Relay Reef. Two things follow:

• Expect a slightly darker sound than Relay Reef, because 500k pots load the pickups more than 1 MΩ.
• The volume sweep may be uneven. On the Coupeville prototype, audio-taper volumes in this circuit gave a sudden drop near the top of the sweep; linear 1 MΩ pots fixed it. Reef Plus tests whether the stock concentric parts are usable. If the sweep bothers you, build Relay Reef instead.

Choose Reef Plus if you want Reef's contrast with separate tone control for each family.

Who it's for

Indie, surf, alt-country, shoegaze, and studio players who want radically different clean and driven sounds without changing guitars, and who want tone control on each side.