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Permalink Reply by David McQueen on September 26, 2013 at 7:24am

Bridge will give you more treble and the neck position will give you more bass. That is why your "Tone" control is interesting. Doing a blend may actually partially achieve tone control.

The other thing I tried was piezo array. I put 3 different sized piezos in one parallel array at the neck and a single at the bridge, coming in parallel to the others, each with their own on/off volume pots. What I was trying to do was dampen the resonance frequency of the single piezo. It was an improvement.   Then I ran it through a preamp. that gave more improvement, much better than naked piezos.

I know the disk piezos get slagged, but that is what is used for high end pickups for bases and violins, with really good, imopedence dampening preamps.

As for committing the positions of the piezos, get yourself some plumber's O rings. Put it under the piezo to give it its own shock absorber and then just masking tape over the whole assembly. Rip off the tape and move it if you don't like the result.

You can test that the assembly works just by tapping the piezos prior to drilling and  mounting any of the pots.

And above all ... Have fun.

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Permalink Reply by jabes on September 26, 2013 at 11:03pm

I found by accident that 10k vol pot resulted in a lot less treble shrill from yer piezo...

 

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Permalink Reply by Richard Rose on September 28, 2013 at 2:28am

I'm sure I will have to mess around with that. I bought 27mm p-zoes. I would think the larger the surface area the lower the impedance but that's just a guess. Need to make a R twiddle box. Been needing one.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Rose on September 28, 2013 at 2:23am

Thanks David, great tips!

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Permalink Reply by David L. on September 28, 2013 at 3:40am

Hi,

If you are trying to get different tones from your cigar box guitar piezos Glenn Reither managed to work out a passive circuit which he posted here (it contains a link to a video which is worth a look)

 http://www.cigarboxnation.com/forum/topics/passive-tone-control-for...

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Permalink Reply by David McQueen on September 28, 2013 at 1:38pm

Yup. That is the article I couldn't find.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Rose on September 28, 2013 at 6:12pm

That's a great post. Reither put a lot of time into the setup he had. That will certainly save me some unnecessary didly fingering with the wrong values. Got my neck about half done. Decided to go ahead with frets.

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Permalink Reply by BUGGY (C) on September 30, 2013 at 10:02am

Two of them directly under the bridge should work well....but watch the pot values as you will zap the output from the piezo..

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Permalink Reply by Stevie Miller on October 1, 2013 at 1:59am

Pretty sure what you have labeled as the tone pot will act like a mix/blend pot. Someone will far more electronic knowledge than I can tell you for sure.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Rose on October 2, 2013 at 4:41am

That's the idea. The tone knob would give a percentage of each depending on position from all of one or the other to anywhere in between. I suspect I will need a simple in-line preamp but maybe not.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Rose on November 21, 2013 at 1:48am

I am almost finished now. I had ordered a cheap Chinese fender pup set so I went the easy way and used it instead of the piezoes (Might make a Bass with them). Now I have to decide which 3 strings to use. 123 or 234 . I took my time with it and it was worth it. Looks real nice...

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