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Quiet piezo's

Hello everyone, this is my first post here at CBN, although I've read through quite a few threads here.

Yesterday I decided to build some surface mount piezos for an archtop I have, the plan being to wire the output to the existing one so I could blend the transducers and the p90 already installed. My problem is while testing, ( soldered to its own output jack for test purposes) the pickups are VERY quiet, I had to turn my 40A tube amp up to 100% to get loud volumes out of them, they sounded fine but are unuseable due to this volume issue. Second test, I plugged them into a di box into garage band. Again way too quiet to be useable, even with all settings maxed. (not a good start) I used small disks inside on beer caps encased in silicone, audio cable from some old pedal connector cables, a 500k pot. Another test I did was to remove all insulation from the disk and I mounted it directly to the surface of the guit. louder. but still unuseable. Any sugestions? did I chose the wrong disks? wrong pot? any help could be VERY helpful on the matter. Thanks guys/gals.

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Permalink Reply by EzMac on April 19, 2013 at 2:17am

that will be my next test. thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Aaron Wood on May 18, 2017 at 1:50pm

I know this is really old, but did you find a solution? I'm running into the same thing. 3 separate piezos that are at a whisper when going through 3 different volume pots.
I've undone everything, and wired all three straight to input jacks and they are as loud as can be. Wood like to have them going through the. Plume pots though. Amy help?

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Permalink Reply by Aaron Wood on May 18, 2017 at 1:51pm

*would like ... and *through the volume pots..

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Permalink Reply by darryl kernaghan on May 18, 2017 at 2:14pm

By the sound of that Aaron, it seems your wiring of the pots is wrong, unless in the very unlikely case of 3 non functional pots. Are you running the pots in series to one jack? Or 3 individual pots in parallel to the jack? Either way, just add 1 pot and piezo at a time to narrow it down a bit, their might be a need for diodes on each hot wire before the jack to stop signal returning to other pots and piezo's, but i've never had that issue in duel piezo git's i''ve done