8-string Pickup Decision: Ditching Piezo for Better Sound
Introduction
Ok. I have already made some noise about the Wood Branch Instrument. My friend had made it once and presented it to me as a gift with the condition that I electrify it. And I did.
First Attempt to Electrify the Wood Branch Instrument.
The first time I decided to go with the simplest solution. I have applied the piezo element. It was a cheap but nice-looking guy.
This red-black round thing in the bottom right corner.
This is how the input jack fixed.
Sonic Disaster
What has come out of this I can not other than “Sonic Disaster”.
As I understand now, piezo works fairly well on the thin decks of conventional stringed instruments like guitars or even cigar box guitars. In other words, on something that resonates well. Especially on, what has a resonating chamber.
In this particular case of mine, it’s just a piece of thick and heavy wood. As I understand, such a type of wood is not a good conductor of the vibrations of the strings.
Just listen to this:
A pain to my ears! Don’t you agree?
Upgrade Idea: 8-string Pickup
I started to think about an upgrade. If the piezo element doesn’t work then the magnetic pickup might work. It has to. For the vibrations of the strings in a magnetic pickup are converted into electric signals which don’t depend on the wood structure.
Of course, I don’t want to spend a fortune on this ridiculous instrument. But hey! We always want to have a playable instrument. Right?
So I decided to shop around for some magnetic pickup.
I Found a 8-string Pickup on TEMU
I have to say that originally the Wood Branch guitar was made as an 8-string instrument. And I promised my friend to place 2 additional strings on it.
Therefore, my search for the pickup is narrowed to the “8-string pickup”. When I google it, the search brought me mostly 3 sources: TEMU, AliExpress, and Etsy.
Etsy is quite an exotic place, and the pickups there are high-end and thus very expensive.
AliExpress has 8-string pickups which are quite cheap. They are comparable to the ones on TEMU. But if you like me purchased anything on AliExpress, you should know the problem with the delivery period.
So, my choice was TEMU this time. I already knew that it was the Chinese rival of Amazon. And I wanted to give it a try. That was my first purchase on TEMU. I understood that there is no Prime delivery like on Amazon, but the delivery dates were acceptable to me. So I gave it a try.
The results?
The 8-string pickup arrived on the first day of the promised period!
Drawbacks?
The item arrived with no single instruction on how to connect the 8-string pickup which has 5(!) wires coming out.
Probably I will use the following diagram:
That’s true, I have to add the volume control. But, as I said earlier, we always want to make a playable instrument. So I need to search in my inventory for a 250K potentiometer, and obviously an input jack.
The 8-string Pickup Has Arrived
Here’s what I have to do next:
- remove the Piezo pickup;
- make a groove to settle the 8-string pickup;
- make a nest for the potentiometer and the jack. I believe I have to make some sort of pickguard/plate in order to fix them in the nest;
- solder everything according to the diagram;
- Install everything;
- add 2 more strings to make the Wood Branch guitar actually an 8-string instrument
Stay tuned for the upgrade report.
