![]() Tin foil is a good replacement, secured in place with double-sided tape. It's usually done with copper tape, but I didn't have it and it's very expensive. More on that in the post about the preamplifier used with this.Īlso while the guitar was dismantled, I thought it would be a good idea to shield it better (it was not shielded at all - loud hum). When a mono instrument cable is connected, the piezo pickup is shorted out. The piezo hot wire is wired to a stereo output jack (the middle part of the jack, tip is still the hot output from magnetic pickups, sleeve is a common ground for both pickups) which replaced the original mono jack on the guitar. Picture 6 - Tiny hole drilled for the piezo pickup wires. Picture 5 - Thin piece of metal to prevent shorting. As you can see in picture 5, I put a piece of metal beneath the strings in place where they shorted the discs, so the pressure from the strings is more divided on much bigger area. It worked for a few hours, then the strings cut through the tape. In the third picture, there is a finished pickup, but it wouldn't work like this, because as I found out, the strings are touching the pickup (cutting through epoxy) and therefore shorting it out. Picture 2 - Whole pickup is being held in place while the epoxy hardens. When the threes discs were shaped and wires soldered to them, I used epoxy to glue it to the bridge. ![]() There are many posts or videos on the internet about soldering piezo disc so look those up. Also soldering the middle is kind of tricky as it can easily melt away if you heat it too much, the soldering iron must be in contact with it for only one or two seconds. I used regular tin snips without trouble. Picture 1 - Red lines are cuts to make the outer pieces, with the green one to make the center piece, blue and black dots are solder joints.īe careful when cutting the disc, the ceramic middle is very fragile. Again, I don't have a photo of the whole pickup before it was put on the bridge, so at least I made this picture: Then I proceeded to cut these discs to shape, I used three, one was cut on four sides into a rectangle and the other two were cut on three sides, so that there would be that metal overhang on both sides, for soldering a ground wire (which is not really necessary on both sides, but it looks better when it is symmetric, and since the bridge itself is grounded, there is really no need for an extra ground wire coming from the discs). For example these 31mm discs have the same sized crystals like the 27mm ones, but those 31s were cheaper for some reason, so I didn't really care. When buying these, watch for these diameters, vendors in my country only show the metal disc diameter, which is kind of useless if you want to cut these metal discs away, like me. It's a thin metal disc, 31mm in diameter, with 18mm of the actual crystal in the center of it. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the bridge before placing the piezos inside, but you can google it with ease. ![]() I decided to try it with Danelectro first, because its bridge is a Badass wraparound, with very nice place on the bottom for something like a piezo membrane. Then it was obvious that it would have to be placed directly on the bridge. And it still picked up a lot of unwanted sounds. But having a piezo disc on your headstock with cables going from it is not exactly pretty. Results with the Danelectro were again garbage, but with Les Paul, the sound was actually awesome. Then I tried to place the disc on the headstock, just like you would do with some tuners. I tried the same thing with my Les Paul with similar results. The sound was garbage and it amplified a lot of unwanted things like me touching the guitar (which was obvious). I placed it on the body of my Danelectro, near the bridge. I bought a medium-sized piezo disc, which I wired as shown in the video above. So I decided to build myself a piezo contact microphone and use it on my electric guitars. It also comes with a schematic for a preamplifier, which I'll show you in another post. I came across a video on Youtube (here is a LINK), it explains what a piezo is and how to use it as a contact microphone. But those are not cheap, they're not incredibly expensive, but at the time, I did not want to invest in it.īut now that I got into DIY, things have changed. I noticed that there are bridges with piezo saddles on the market, for Les Pauls and probably for other guitars. ![]() I always kind of wanted a piezo pickup on any of my electric guitars. In this post, I will talk about installing a piezo pickup on my Danelectro DC59.
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