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Cheap alternative to piezo pickups

As cheap as piezos are, I found a cheaper alternative.

I picked up a set of headphones at the 99 Cents Only store for, what else, 99 cents. It came with an 1/8" to 1/4" adapter, so I connected it up and plugged it into my guitar amp. SInce a speaker and a microphone are basically the same thing (a vibrating diaphragm that converts vibrations into an electrical signal or vice versa), the headphones function pretty much the same as piezos. The only thing is that since the headphones are in stereo and the amp is mono, you need to tap each side of the headphone to determine which is the one that is sending the signal to the amp.

After I found that out, I broke the "speaker" section off of the headphones and cut the wire that went to the other non-sounding speaker. This left me with a microphone and about 5 feet of wire.

I drilled a small hole in the resonator of my diddley bow (an altoids can), fed the wire through from the inside out (taking off the adapter so I could keep the hole small), and taped the mic to the inside of the can.

Sounds great, actually has a pretty decent bass response. In my ears it's better than the piezo I have in my 3 string CBG.

I'm going to try and post some pictures over at California CBG Group, if you'd like to see my DB.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dianne Woods on December 23, 2009 at 3:06am

Great idea. Thanks for sharing.

Permalink Reply by Bill Jehle on December 23, 2009 at 3:22am

I actually have some old plans from the 50s and 60s that talk about doing the same sort of thing. Thank you for reminding me of that, and for bringing it up as another way to amplify a cigar box guitar.

I've got loads of old headphones in a bucket. I think I just found out how to use them all.

--Bill

Permalink Reply by Kevin Lawton on December 26, 2009 at 6:22am

Yep, that works. The amount of signal you can expect to get out of it is likely to be somewhere around that of a high-output microphone - somewhat less than a magnetic guitar pickup. When I was first messing around with home-made instruments back in the 60's and 70's I used to use old telephone earpiece insodes as contact microphones in just the same way and they worked fine. Then I eventually worked out how to get a good signal out of a piezo crystal so I stopped ripping telephones apart ! Those very cheap light plastic headphones that airlines used to give away to passengers who wanted to listen to the 'in flight entertainment' would probably be best as they are nice and light - and not really much use for anything else either.

Permalink Reply by Jerryrig240 on January 8, 2010 at 7:39am

Ooooo, I like this idea. I am not a huge fan of Peizo's for the simple reason, most of the time I want to distort my sound, and peizo's don't really like to be distorted much. Thanks for sharing. I made a stomp box one time out of some old headphone speakers. Sounded pretty good. I found tha tthe bigger the headphone, the better the sound.

Permalink Reply by Jerryrig240 on January 26, 2010 at 2:24am

Would this work with old computer speakers.....a large speaker in a box? Just wondering?

Permalink Reply by Jordan Burk on July 1, 2010 at 8:04am

sounds cool! I've got some good doner headphones, and earphones. I wonder if you have headphones with a built in volume control could you use it for you volume?

Permalink Reply by Jordan Burk on July 1, 2010 at 10:35am

Just trying out the headphone pickup. I hope its louder in a cigar box, but it did work with my amp.