Low Z Pickups

Drilled out some wooden checkers, glued in a washer and topped that with some graphics from an altoids tin. Makes the magnets adjustable on the fly.
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  • You're the mad scientist turlehead, your ideas look intriguing and definitely warrant exploration. 

  • No elephants were harmed in the making of these yet RTZ ;)

    smilingdog - I might have to pick one of those up - seems like a steal.  These pickups are on the other end of the spectrum from a piezo impedance wise, so I've been looking at some microphone preamps lately too.  The main thing I was going for here was to be able to adjust the magnets depending on whether the strings were wound or plain and this has worked out pretty good. 

    I also wired in a piezo to this circuit with a volume knob of it's own.  Even with the impedance mismatch, it seems to work halfway decent to dial in a little piezo sound. 

  • yeah but who killed Topsy

    Image result for edison tesla

  • What effects are you finding specifically? I use a 500K pot rather than a 250K with piezo and that had a significant improvement including a cap. What really boosted and cleaned up my signal and added an interesting side effect by reducing feedback was a Behringer preamp Booster PB100 pedal. This turned my cheap CBG into a beast. There are other cheats for magnetic pole pickups to double there output but you'd definitely need to filter the impedance to match the output.306609621?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024

  • Thanks folks.  Yep Darryl, that's what I was shooting for with this one - trying to make something that would work with any combination of wound and unwound strings.

    Andy - I'm going to work up a diagram and another video showing the process from start to finish because I'm with you that these are an improvement over piezos and a fantastic DIY CBG project. 

  • Good idea Turtlehead, gives a work around for the issues Rogorsky had re the b string on a sixer, plus subtle tone changes i suspect

  • turtlehead - awesome job!  And what a great demo video - - well done!

  • Wow!  Um...do you have a plan or a schematic or something like that, something that can walk a guy like me--a guy NOT technically savvy or inclined--through the process successfully?  Heck, I don't even know what a "wall wart" is, much less how to wire one up!  I'm asking because all of this looks and sounds better than a piezo. 

  • Very cool, sounds great too!

  • Not so simple then. It does sound good.

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