It will make sound! Don´t expect it to sound any better – or much worse – than a 100$ piezoo. Try fitting it to different places on your instrument. You have now made your very own piezo disc pickup. There are easy ones that are essentially a piezo pickup enclosed in a piece of wood or plastic that you stick onto the top oof the instrument with double-stick. Attach a jack plug to the far wire end, connect it to an amplifier. If you are fitting a pickup to your own mouthpiece or clarinet barrel or to. You have now made your very own piezo disc pickup, to further improve it, you can insulate it with epoxy for durability, and sandwich an insulating sheet of plastic tape between the ceramic part and a thin metal foil screen on top, to screen against hum. The PiezoBarrel output is line level and you may want to turn the output. If you linger or apply too much the piezoo silver top will come off. Piezos can also be used in industrial applications. (piezo buzzers) A piezo pickup therefore uses some crystals to produce output voltage from vibrations. Then, carefully, using very little solder, very little heat, and be damn quick! solder the center wire to the silver metallized top part of the ceramic disc surface near the edge. The piezo-electric effect is the caracteristic of crystals to develop electrical charges when submitted to a mechanical constraint.

Soldering a screen wrap wire to the piezo element.Ĭarefully solder the screen wrap wire to the brass foil backing´s edge – make sure it can not touch the ceramic part.

Pre-tin the center wire, an have the insulation protrude just 1/8″ or 3mm from the screen wrap, and then a bare, tinned 2mm inner core. Get a thin screened wire (a center wire and a copper mesh screen wrapping), again from a scrap piece of electronic equipment, strip the outer insulation, twist and bend to one side and pre-tin the screen wrap, and cut it very short. Use only resin core electronic solder wire. If you are not familiar with a soldering iron, have a friend help you go on to the next step. Be careful you don´t bend it, the ceramic part breaks easily. Some piezo accelerometers can have as little as 200pF capacitance, meaning that the preamp input impedance must be at least 20M to get a -3dB frequency of 40Hz. Inside, find the disc shaped “speaker” part – it is usually a circular brass sheet with a silver metallised ceramic plate on one side. Really, with a little bit of luck, it IS free. Dig up the silly tune musical greeting card, or the bust electronic mini alarm clock, the bust ghetto blaster with treble piezo speakers, or any crappy electronic device with a sound output, like your kid brothers hateful toy with a siren sound – the piezo´s make the beeping sound every where in cheap electronic devices. You might also be successful with other n-channel JFET transistor types, but not all off them work with the current and bias from your microphone input supply.Piezo speaker from a musical greeting card.Ī 10Cent do-it-your-self piezoo is priced just right.

a resistor in the range of 20kOhm to 100kOhm.

10-25mm piezo disc (bigger ones are more sensitive) piezo discs (at least one for each drum you want a trigger on, preferably more in case you screw up) small gauge, double-stranded wire (about 6 of wire per.

You can solder an audio cable to the disc and a 3.5mm audio jack (mono or stereo) on the other end.Ī typical (headset-) microphone input circuit has a resistor and a capacitor included that complete the circuit to be a proper (and simple) JFET amplifier (Fig.3). Single coil pickups, as the name implies, utilize a single magnet. Once the piezo is hooked up, it is referred to as a contact mike because it needs to touch the object we want to amplify: Place an amplified piezo against a surface and you will hear vibrations that are typically inaudible. We’ll start by looking at, arguably the most common, the single coil pickup. The transistor should be as close as possible to the disc to effectively protect your signal against environmental noise. While there are variations of each there really are three main types of pickup seen on DIY electric guitar kits, single coil pickups, humbuckers and P90 pickups. Our simple and effective circuit consists just of a JFET transistor and a resistor (Fig.2). To enhance the signal quality a pre-amplifier that boosts the current from the piezo disc is needed and thus gives you more bass response.

Also, the low current and capacitance of the disc forms a natural high pass filter with your microphone input amplifier. Piezo discs have a very low-current output signal and are thus very susceptible to noise from the environment (e.g.

Diy make your own piezo pickups