Step 10: Making a Piezo Pickup

As I mentioned earlier on, in order for the CBG to be plugged into an amplifier, we need some kind of pickup, and the traditional method is to use a cheap piezo buzzer from somewhere like Maplins or Radio Shack, so that is what I'm planning on doing.

In it's simplest for, we need a Piezo, a Jack socket and some shielded wire (it doesn't have to be shielded, but it will have less rattle & hum and local taxi cabs about it if it is). After that it is easy enough to do if you can use a soldering iron, and not so bad if you are willing to give it a go.

I fall into the latter camp, obviously.

Well, first off I removed the sleeve from my wire so that the inner copperness was exposed. The cable I'm using has two wires within one sleeve, which is good as there are two outputs from the piezo and two inputs on the Jack socket, which suggests a path that even I think I might be able to follow. I might have got confused otherwise.

First job then is to remove the two wires that are already connected to the piezo. This might seem a little radical, but the wire I'm using can be connected easy enough and is probably a better quality. I could connect the existing wire to my new wire, but I can't see the point of creating extra joints that might fail at some point. Simple is best, I reckon when it comes to all of this.

To remove the wire, I heated the blob of solder with the solder iron and used a beautifully named 'solder sucker' to literally hoover up the molten blob off the surface. The wire just comes away and it is pretty much a clean getaway. I did remember to note down which part of the disk the red wire was connected to and which the black or ground was stuck onto. (The red is the live and for the record it goes on the uncovered outer ring of the disk - the ground going to a hole cut in the middle of the 'label' - if you think the piezo disk looks like a record, that is.)

Next then, I stripped back each of the two wire ends on my shielded wire and soldered them, one to each part. I also finally remembered that perhaps twenty-five foot of wire might be a bit snug in my little cigar box, and so chopped a foot or so off the end and used that, before stripping the exposed wire and blobbing them with solder too. From here, it should be easie peasie to simply solder them onto the jack, and so it proved to be.

Not believing my luck, I plugged a guitar lead into the jack and then into a small amp, and tested to see whether it worked or not by holding a vibrating tuning fork over it. (I had one handy, you can just tap it with a screwdriver or something, but I was trying to look like I knew what I was doing in front of the kids.)

Anyway,
amazingly
it worked.

Bloody Hell.

I must admit I'll probably have a think about the shielding of the piezo as even like this it sounds a tad noisy, but more on that later.