Cajun box/semi acoustic guitar hybrid

[Old Tooth Hopkins]

I’ve got this wild idea of installing a piezo element within a semi acoustic (thinline Tele) I’m building, so it can also act as a percussive instrument as well as standard guitar playing. With only one output so I won’t need a second cable or amp.

It may have a switch to turn the piezo element on or off, and a resistor in the wiring to prevent blowing up the amp.

Anyone know how this may be done?

Ie sort of a cross between

[Old Tooth Hopkins]

Maybe not the tonal controls like the first picture, but having a piezo which responds to different ways of hand percussion knocking would be good

[JohnH]

I can't help with the how, but I'm super curious to know. I like this idea a lot

[WeirdBits]

Combining a piezo with magnetic pickups into a single output usually means adding a pre-amp/active system. There are a few cheap'ish ones available specifically designed for mixing a piezo with passive pups. It's probably going to be best path to take and give you the sort of control you'll need.

[Old Tooth Hopkins]

Looks like I have one of two methods.

1. Use a passive bass pick up but fitting that into the f hole will be challenging. Even a slimline one. That way a pre amp won’t be necessary. The wiring should be similar to a 3 pick up system wiring? I will also need to look at attaching a vibrating metal plate and match the natural frequency.

2. Piezo with pre amp. Then question is where do I put the pre amp. I don’t exactly want to frankeinstein my Tele too much.

[Simon Barden]

Piezo pickups and magnetic pickups are very different beasts with different output levels (piezo signal is generally 1/10th that of a standard non-hot pickup).

You'd normally want to run a straight piezo into an input with at least 5 Megohm input impedance, and preferably 10 Megohms. With a standard 1 Meg guitar amp input (which in reality is often a less). the bass response of the piezo suffers, so you won't get much bassy thud. And passing the signal through standard guitar tone and volume controls would load the pickup so much that it would be useless.

If you wanted to fit a magnetic pickup in the F-hole cavity (as you know they will produce an audible thud when you hit them), then it won't need to be a bass one. Any cheap guitar pickup with exposed pole pieces should do and you could epoxy it to the underside of the top. (say a tele neck pickup with the cover removed) Obviously you'd want to locate the pickup in the area where you can hit the top from a playing position. I'd suggest using an non wax-potted coil if one is available.

There's not a huge hollow area on a thinline, so any resonance is going to be at a pretty high frequency, so you'll get what you get..

You could fit a simple pre-amp (no visible volume or tone controls), within the control cavity and fit a battery in there as well. You might need to expand the cavity a bit, but you've got a large pickguard to hide it under.

It might be worth experimenting with a small bit of ply and an old guitar pickup and some more ordinary glue for a temporary set up to see how well a guitar pickup would pick up knocks if attached to the underside of the top (it could even be stuck to the pickguard).

Don't forget that any hidden pickup can be trimmed down to only what's necessary to keep everything in place to work, if it makes fitting it easier.

[Fretworn]

I'd just experiment and see if it works. I have a piezo disk in my cigar box guitar and it picks up all body sounds very easily. Because you are talking about using it for percussion sounds you shouldn't have to worry about the pre-amp, but it will need to be a completely separate circuit, with its own volume. Otherwise the guitar might be unplayable from microphonic noise.

[fender3x]

I think Pete Townshend and Frank Zappa both installed piezzos in strats. Any idea how they did it?



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[dave.king1]

I think Pete Townshend and Frank Zappa both installed piezzos in strats. Any idea how they did it?



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So did Roland, have a review in a guitar mag somewhere that gives it a thumbs up with differences to a Variax.

A guy local to me put Variax guts into a Tele

[Simon Barden]

IIRC, Pete Townshend has a Fishman Powerbridge fitted to his Strat. https://www.fishman.com/products/series/powerbridge/