How I built my ‘Homebrew’ Piezo |
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Fretsville Reality Check |
I built the pickup for my cigar box uke
with less than $5 worth of Radio Shack parts. Parts list:
Required Tools:
I salvaged the necessary shielded wire from a non-working serial mouse cable. Actually, if you’re resourceful, you might be able to build one for free, or nearly so, since the piezo element itself could be scavenged from a wide variety sources, including dead smoke detectors or musical greeting cards. The standard ¼-inch phone jack is one part I would not try to scavenge, since any corrosion can cause all kinds of noise and connection problems. Here’s a step-by-step rundown of what I did: 1.) Take apart the plastic housing and remove the piezo element from the Radio Shack buzzer. Take care not to bend the element — doing so would permanently damage it. 2.) Remove the soldered connections from the element. 3.) Cut a length of the shielded cable and strip the ends. Make sure that the cable length is correct for your installation. Try to keep it as short as possible, while still allowing some slack to experiment with the pickup’s final location. Mine had five or six wires in the cable, since it was scavenged from a dead serial mouse. I snipped all of them off except two, since that was all I needed. 4.) Solder the connections to the pickup. Be quick about it and don’t allow the piezo element to get too hot, since this is another way to kill the element. 5.) Solder the connections to the ¼-inch jack. 6.) Test the pickup by taping it to something and then connect it to an amplifier using a standard guitar cord. Tapping next to it on whatever it is you taped it to should produce some sound in the amplifier. If it does, then you’re ready to install the pickup. Otherwise check your connections and try again. If the connections are good but it still won’t work, start over using a different piezo element. Now you're ready to install the pickup. |
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