DIY piezo pickup pre-amp?

[briane]

Ive built a number of piezo pre-amps into simple guitars I built - at one point even designing a 'tone shaping circuit' around them to cut the hiss, neck slide, and low end whack.

yep - basically like cigar box guitar, nylon bass uke strings.

I made a catallion of em to test lots of different build configs. that 14 more than a bazillion.

you gotta pot those things in exopy. the wood thickness of the frame that the epoxy sits in is critical - not too thick, not too thin - maybe 3/16" thick. expoxy both sides pickup - about 1/8" wood under pickup, and 1/8" epoxy. In the end I got about 3/4 good, 1 bad. partly just chance....

attach with double sided tape under soundeboard, under/near bridge.

then a circuit on top - similar to a wurli cut control - .001 to grn right off tap to tame high end, through a 22k resistor, then 10m & .01 to grn in parellel, and through a 10uf cap on the out (+ to pickup circuit, - to amp) - that worked much better than just sticking the pickup on the body with double tape.

yep - that was what I did most of 1 winter few years back....