Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Bad Wolf on January 14, 2013 at 2:27am

ok this is gonna sound even dumber but my ibanez didnt have the tune-o-matic bridge on it. i dont know what i was thinking (told you its been a while since i played it!) however it has some similar. its like a t-o-m bridge except its one piece instead of having the seperate tail piece and the strings wrap around from the front.

 

i went ahead and experimented with it and found that while the pickup does register the vibrations while holding the piezo directly onto the bridge its no where near as loud as if the strings were putting pressure directly on the elements. basically i dont think the idea of taping the rod underneath the t-o-m bridge would work very well

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on January 14, 2013 at 3:09am

Yeah, those are the old style TOM bridges. So those individually wired saddle / piezo disc combos are starting to make more sense...well, at least you proved that it works, just not very well. Hmm. You could always replace the individually adjustable saddles with a single bone saddle, on top of the rod, but that kinda defeats the purpose...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Bad Wolf on January 14, 2013 at 4:05am

i think im just gonna get one of the cheap TOM bridges and play around with it some more. im curious how to go about using one of the rod piezos cut into seperate pieces. i took one of the elements apart and it was just the little ceramic or whatever element wrapped in metal with heat shrink around it. seems you could solder wires to each indidual element and get it to work but im not sure

 

probably be easier just to stick a disc piezo inside the box and call it done

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by David McQueen on January 14, 2013 at 5:18am

You may want to also experiment with strips of disk piezo in both series and parallel. Disk piezo has a very high resistance. This is part of why passive tone controls are difficult. Here you have the opportunity of putting 6 strips in parallel and dramatically dropping the resistance.

Example, 2 x 8 ohm speakers + 1 x 4 Ohm speaker:

Wired in Series:  20 Ohms

Wired in Parallel:  2 Ohms

Here is a page showing the calculation:

http://physics.bu.edu/py106/notes/Circuits.html

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Bad Wolf on January 14, 2013 at 5:58am

can i use 24 guage speaker wire to wire up piezo discs? did a search here and google but didnt get a definitive answer

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by David McQueen on January 14, 2013 at 6:34am

I believe that is exactly what I am using all the time.

The thicker the wire, the harder it is going to be to fit in tight places ... but .... the lower the resistance.

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page