Picked up on this a bit late but anyway!
I've built a few talk boxes in my time and still use one live when playing two of Peter Frampton's songs "Show Me The Way" and "Do You Feel Like We Do". I built my current one around 2003 and it's a real workhorse and it's given me no problems at all through 7 years of live playing.
There are a few things to note when building a traditional style talk box:
- Choose a horn driver that can handle as wide as possible a frequency bandwidth, even down to 350Hz and use one with a higher wattage than your amp. (Mine is triple the value)
- Build a splitter box with a footswitch that can toggle your guitar amp's speaker output to be routed either to the amp's speaker or to the horn driver (mine sits at my mike stand with a short lead to a dpdt mounted in a round Roland pedal.
- Remember, if you use an amp other than your existing stage guitar amp it will be very distracting to yourself on stage since you will be hearing the guitar coming through the amp in addition to the talkbox's sound going from the mic out through the FOH system and also back through your floor monitors. I'm talking from personal experience here. You don't want to hear both.
- Take note: Horn drivers don't like being fed a distorted signal so when playing the talkbox use a clean sound, I've found bridge single-coil or humbucker bridge in coil-split mode to be the clearest and the best tone for my own talk box designs.
If you need any help just let me know. I can post pictures if anyone is interested.
