The primary reason you are not getting a balanced sound, is that you are not impedance matched. Piezos need a preamp of some sort to impedance buffer before going into a 1/8" or 1/4" jack like you have. Effectively, it creates a high pass filter with the mismatched impedance, and that's what's making your sound tinny and full of harsh high frequencies.
Rod Elliott on ESP did a really good write up about this titled "Piezo pickup preamplifiers". You basically have two options. One is to present a very high input impedance to the piezo (probably 10Mohm or more). The other is to build a slightly unusual circuit called a charge amplifier that presents near 0 impedance to the piezo. If you're handy with electronics it's a good DIY project because there aren't many off the shelf options.
Yeah during uni myself and a few friends made about 20, then turned a moving wall room into a sonic art installation with various items for users to interact with. We made them all waterproof and had sections of it that were large water containers with rocks and stream sounds, sections of the floor that made sound when you walked over them and interactive plants. All running into a few laptops then with the sounds processed and being sent out of one of the 4 speakers in each corner. Good fun.
Thanks! This project is just what I was looking for to experiment with my kids. It's a great entry point into analog electronics and the link to physics :)
@@Tunkkis yes, but it has no scientific merit, and one could apply it to everything to make it sound better. Like it has some weight in an argument, but it's really just hot air.
@@EkelundDK Oh, absolutely. I wasn't arguing for the use of anecdotal evidence, though I can see how someone could interpret my comment that way. I only wished to point out that he didn't come up with the term.
Great video! I love the simplicity of those devices. I recall the first time I encountered these (late 1970s) in the fire alarm panels we maintained. I was new in the field of electronics and had not seen one before, they were used as audio trouble indicators in the fire panels. I thought they were some kind of modern day “black magic”, kind of like LEDs and Peltier devices. Put a little voltage in and out comes something totally different! “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Yeah, they've always been a mystery to me too. I know that they worked, but not how, so I figured that's a great excuse to make a video and do my research! Especially so after finding that piezo siren and realizing just how freakishly loud they can be.
This is so well made. I really appreciate all the information. It took me a lot of time to find all the necessary information about piezos and how they work and this explains basically everything you need to know.
Thank you, that's the aim of my videos. Not to be exhaustive but to give enough information to get started, and get a general knowledge to be able to create and research further if needed.
The answer to can one build a pcb for its musical properties is yes.. the lenght and thickness will change its harmonics so you can fine tune a pcb if you wish.
Not sure how well it would reproduce with a piezo, but hang a metal coat hanger from a string and flick the hanger. If you want to hear what it’s supposed to sound like, wrap the string around your finger, stick your finger in your ear, and flick. It sounds pretty amazing
I did this years ago to some guitars just with super glue and the audio jack, the quality of the sound wasn't the best but it was still a nice project and gave me an "electroacustic guitar" for almost free.
Glue or tape on some mass to the air side of the piezo for a stronger signal and some interesting effects. Glue on a spring any I would guess you might have some echo.
I couldn't get any useful sound out of the piezos that I bought, even with a mini amp with 9v battery so I got the premade ones off ebay (red and black). Supposedly these will work a lot better according to other videos. If you're having issues then try that or maybe leave me a reply and I'll let you know how it went.
I have what appears to be a two tone piezo disc that I salvaged from an old smoke alarm (don't worry, I was careful with the radioactive bit). I think its two tone since it has two separate crystal areas, both of which have wires going to them, plus a third to the metal disc. I only mention this because I didn't know there were such things and thought it was interesting.
Yeah, I’ve seen those before, it’s not a two tone piezo. It’s actually a self driving piezo. More information can be found about them here: makezine.com/2009/12/03/ask-make-three-legged-piezo/
I was so looking forward to you pressing the puck against the elephant :( Great video, thank you! Loved the little tune you played, go on producing music, I am listening forward to it!
The friend could have connected to this pickup a reverb pedal, of those used in guitars, of the type "Pitch Shifter Delay PS-3 Boss", it would make very cool effects!
I made one on bare copper board, in electronics class a few years ago, and it had a lovely distorted sound. I only had a ukulele to try it on, and black metal ukulele is a fantastic combination. Sadly, when I made a proper perf board version, the distortion went away, and now it sounds clean and smooth. What a shame, that noisy mishap was better then expected.
this is amazing! love your videos and love the message at the end. i've been trying to learn an instrument for years, on and off. it never occurred to me that our skill level or knowledge is irrelevant to enjoy making music until i read "how music works" by david byrne. music is really for everyone in the same way love and food is. we don't discuss talent for those. it's part of being human.
I'll add that to my reading list. I do want to learn more about making music, since I've kind of given up learning how to play an instrument I want to explore the side of music production more.
Have you experimented with different types of surfaces any to see what materials communicate sound more clearly? Plastic, metal, wood, tile, etc...? Also what materials dampen signal better? Rubber, foam, cork, etc...?
What do you use as a pre-amplifier and amplifier? What audio gain can you achieve? I want to record all the noises that are present in my home ......... . I have several of these 34mm piezo ones and I need to try!!! Any suggestions? Thank you.
Great! What's the five hole holder called, and where can I get it? The one looking like a piece of Lego Technic, but with screws in it. SOLVED: Grounding Bar, now I heard it in the video. Humbly, Ylan
I have piezo disk but i don't have mono Jack cable but i have 3.5mm cable. Can I use 3.5mm cable? And how to do it??? Please reply asap. I want to connect to phone so.
Awesome little project, you got my sub! Have you tested wiring piezo pickups in series? All the know-how on the internet says to do it in parallel, but I can't find a single comparison of someone actually doing it! In magnetic pickups in guitars, wiring in series "doubles" the output of a single pickup while parallel halves it; in piezos it also halves it, which is why series sounds so compelling; piezos already have very low output and every bit helps.
Hey! My choice recording device is my smartphone. So I connected a piezo to a jack then use an adapter (jack - usb c) to connect it on my smartphone. Voice recorder app recognize there is an external microphone and indicate it will record from there. But it doesn’t receive any sound. Do you know what to do?
how would you make a piezo into a speaker? could it be as simple as wiring it to a male 3.5mm jack and plugging it into a mixer? then manipulating the frequencies at different amped up db levels?? curious about that for a personal project...
I have been seriously considering using the bar-style piezo pickups common for some stringed instruments, and inserting them into hollow tubing vs the more common solid front bar/bridge of a DIY kalimba. I feel thtis may well be an improvement over mounting the round disks on the outside of the body of the kalimba. From your experiments and experience, do you think this concept is way off base, or stands to capture much better signal-to noise? Edit: I should note I am speciafically considering solid-body kalimba here, as I kinda prefer the decentish (£20 on ali express) solid board styles to hollow bodies. Double edit: This far I'm largely been cannibalising the bodies of cheap kalimba with ok, but questionable at the high end, tines, and seehing how I can play with the tone using cheap brass (too soft to be long term practical), 'nickel silver' (well, 18% Chinese cupro-nickel like 18th century nickel silver or something) which is a bit soft at 0.8mm still, but tunes without mashing the tines at all and producers lower and more sonorous tones, and beryllium copper/'brass' (which is a pain to work with as it is hard as all hell, but it springs very nicely and similarly producers lower and more mellow tones which I much enjoy). (Both aluminiu and silicon bronze I hope to acquire low cost very soon, too) I unfortunately have puzzling to do on base material (dense solid wood blocks seem to produce very nice tone, but seem hard to work out where to get cheaply), and which some metal tubing/piping for the front and rear tension bars is a doddle, something for the important third part of the tensioning setup I'm rather clueless in acquiring/making without a lot of cost or tools to do required machining...)
Excellent content. Excellent script and pacing. I truly want to build the stuff I see in your videos. You're likely gonna wake up one day in the future, though, and wonder what the hell you were thinking with the septum hardware. But excellent content anyway.
You know what, I am absolutely bewildered how someone can leave such a nice and supportive comment only to do a complete 180 and become offensive and think that your opinion about my life choices, vis a vis my piercings, is in any way welcome. Stop focusing on other people's bodies, it's rude and offensive. I do wonder what the hell you were thinking in writing your comment, it's such an alien thing for me, to even fathom how someone can be so focused on other people like that. It does not sound healthy.
A. Why do you want to dampen the higher-frequency sounds? B. How do you get more than one pitch from plucking the same wire, without changing the length of the wire? Is digital alteration involved?
A) because it causes clipping and the signal doesn’t represent the sound properly, making it appear tinnier than it would otherwise. It’s imbalanced and weighs heavily on the higher frequency side. B) yes, many of those sounds, like the needle, are pitch shifted in a DAW.
The funny thing is, if you actually look at the audio levels the volume of the alarm isn't louder than the peaks during the rest of the video. Just because you imagine it's loud doesn't mean it is. I lowered the volume significantly from the original recording.
Hiho, I wanted to build this but not exactly like you did it - I solderes the wires to my disc and cut an aux cable in half, now there are three wires coming from the aux but only two coming from the disc and I am unsure how to connect them. The important part ofc is, that my phone accepts the piezo disc as headphones, which it doesn't and this confues me a bit - no matter how I connect the three wires to the two wires
Likely you’re using a stereo cable, which has a wire for the left and the right channel, and one for ground. You could connect the left and right channel wires together to essentially make a mono cable out of it. You may have to use a multimeter to figure out which wire goes to which part of the plug though. For it to be recognized by your phone I cannot help you though. That is dependent on your phone.
So you just need to connect (solder) the wires of the piezo disc to a metal? Also, do you know how to make a recording device where I can tape the piezo on top of the recording device. I don't want the recorder to be so large.
I’ve seen that all of contact piezo mics are soldered to mono cables and mono jacks, but it looks here you did it with stereo, am I correct? If so, could I know why? I’ve been making own (both mono and stereo using single piezos) and to be honest still don’t know if there is benefit or if it useful at all. I would like to know your opinion. Loved the video, very inspiring.
The hot melt glue on the disc (where the solder joints are) will dampen the overall sensitivity majorly. I would suggest not doing that to be honest. The set hot glue is also way to stiff to filter out high frequencies.
Funnily enough I did a lot of testing of this before the video to make sure that I wasn't recommending things that I could not back up. A bare disc and a disc absolutely coated in hot glue like in the puck has a barely perceptible difference in sensitivity. As long as you don't encase both sides in hot glue but make sure that the piezo disc has good contact to the substrate (i.e. the wood or the aluminium in this video) you'll be absolutely fine.
Nice! I think, i "must" built this ;-) But, i think allso it is maybee better to connect the twoo Piezo Disks seperatly with the Left and Right Channel.
@@Schwertmaid nope, it would just be the same signal, but at slightly different frequencies as the different sized piezos have slightly different ranges. There really wouldn't be much point.
Hi thank you very much indeed for this very interesting video. I wonder how much the material of the box will impact the sound. I would like to build a pickup to be used in an electric guitar ... i think that finding the oprimal placement of these piezo disks will take a lot of time A lot of trials. Regards, gino
Post processing isn't impossible, but why post process something that harshly is clipping when you can fix it by design instead? You're basically making the case that you should play an untuned guitar because you can just fix it in post anyway.
@@SwitchAndLever You should tune your guitar but you should not need to tune your microphone? Because now I wonder if the voice quality from your throat was so poor because of limitations of the piezo element or due to your dampening attempts. Simple lower pass filtering should be enough to get rid of unwanted high frequencies, right?
@@woowooNeedsFaith it's because it's a contact microphone, and the piezo itself wasn't really designed to be a microphone at all. You could literally scream at it from a foot away and it wouldn't pick up anything, but put against the jawbone when speaking and it will. Of course it's dampened quite a bit by the muscles, skin and tendons in between. You may want to read up a bit on what makes contact microphones different from things like condenser or dynamic microphones.
The primary reason you are not getting a balanced sound, is that you are not impedance matched. Piezos need a preamp of some sort to impedance buffer before going into a 1/8" or 1/4" jack like you have. Effectively, it creates a high pass filter with the mismatched impedance, and that's what's making your sound tinny and full of harsh high frequencies.
Rod Elliott on ESP did a really good write up about this titled "Piezo pickup preamplifiers".
You basically have two options. One is to present a very high input impedance to the piezo (probably 10Mohm or more). The other is to build a slightly unusual circuit called a charge amplifier that presents near 0 impedance to the piezo. If you're handy with electronics it's a good DIY project because there aren't many off the shelf options.
That's cool and helpful. However it's hard to beat the simplicity of this device for those of us with zero electronics knowledge.
@@erickborling1302 you have to start somewhere!
god i love everything digial so i never have to learn any of this
don't get me wrong i like making analog stuff but audio is just beyond me
I like this for many reasons. Too many to list!
It's the face I made after testing the siren, isn't it? 😉
Yeah during uni myself and a few friends made about 20, then turned a moving wall room into a sonic art installation with various items for users to interact with. We made them all waterproof and had sections of it that were large water containers with rocks and stream sounds, sections of the floor that made sound when you walked over them and interactive plants. All running into a few laptops then with the sounds processed and being sent out of one of the 4 speakers in each corner.
Good fun.
Thanks! This project is just what I was looking for to experiment with my kids. It's a great entry point into analog electronics and the link to physics :)
"anecdotal evidence"
That's brilliant, I'll have to start using that expression now :D
Anecdotal evidence is a real term.
@@Tunkkis yes, but it has no scientific merit, and one could apply it to everything to make it sound better. Like it has some weight in an argument, but it's really just hot air.
@@EkelundDK Oh, absolutely. I wasn't arguing for the use of anecdotal evidence, though I can see how someone could interpret my comment that way. I only wished to point out that he didn't come up with the term.
Ah, I understand now, heh. Have a great day, man :)
Great video! I love the simplicity of those devices. I recall the first time I encountered these (late 1970s) in the fire alarm panels we maintained. I was new in the field of electronics and had not seen one before, they were used as audio trouble indicators in the fire panels. I thought they were some kind of modern day “black magic”, kind of like LEDs and Peltier devices. Put a little voltage in and out comes something totally different!
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Yeah, they've always been a mystery to me too. I know that they worked, but not how, so I figured that's a great excuse to make a video and do my research! Especially so after finding that piezo siren and realizing just how freakishly loud they can be.
You can even make your own piezo crystals, as this mad genius is doing.
ua-cam.com/video/K3G2QM5a-9U/v-deo.html
This is so well made. I really appreciate all the information. It took me a lot of time to find all the necessary information about piezos and how they work and this explains basically everything you need to know.
Thank you, that's the aim of my videos. Not to be exhaustive but to give enough information to get started, and get a general knowledge to be able to create and research further if needed.
I gotta ask - are you happy with your septum piercing?
The answer to can one build a pcb for its musical properties is yes.. the lenght and thickness will change its harmonics so you can fine tune a pcb if you wish.
Not sure how well it would reproduce with a piezo, but hang a metal coat hanger from a string and flick the hanger. If you want to hear what it’s supposed to sound like, wrap the string around your finger, stick your finger in your ear, and flick. It sounds pretty amazing
I did this years ago to some guitars just with super glue and the audio jack, the quality of the sound wasn't the best but it was still a nice project and gave me an "electroacustic guitar" for almost free.
Didn't imagines something so useful might be created with such a trivial device
Glue or tape on some mass to the air side of the piezo for a stronger signal and some interesting effects. Glue on a spring any I would guess you might have some echo.
That’s interesting. I may have to play around with that.
I couldn't get any useful sound out of the piezos that I bought, even with a mini amp with 9v battery so I got the premade ones off ebay (red and black). Supposedly these will work a lot better according to other videos. If you're having issues then try that or maybe leave me a reply and I'll let you know how it went.
Phantastic! Lots of brilliant ideas!👏🏼👍🏼
Love the final music.
Exactly what I was looking for. Excellent with clear visual instructions.
I have what appears to be a two tone piezo disc that I salvaged from an old smoke alarm (don't worry, I was careful with the radioactive bit). I think its two tone since it has two separate crystal areas, both of which have wires going to them, plus a third to the metal disc. I only mention this because I didn't know there were such things and thought it was interesting.
Yeah, I’ve seen those before, it’s not a two tone piezo. It’s actually a self driving piezo. More information can be found about them here: makezine.com/2009/12/03/ask-make-three-legged-piezo/
Here we see the world's only man who can actually pronounce 'piezo'
There are two pronunciations both are equally as correct, one has British origins the other American.
I was so looking forward to you pressing the puck against the elephant :(
Great video, thank you! Loved the little tune you played, go on producing music, I am listening forward to it!
Thanks for the useful video! I have been trying to figure out how to hold objects... i finally know you use a grounding bar!!! Thanks
Love it! Thank you for the tips on making the pick ups! Love the stand-alone idea. Seems obvious now, but it wasn't before you showed it. :)
should make a collaboration with Simon the Magpie 👍🏽👍🏽
Would be awesome
I made similar piezo pickups to detect the vibrations for a mass balancing instrument :p
so clear, now is time to create sounds, thank you for sharing
this is so creative and inspirational, countless directions these ideas could go! thanks for making this video ^w^
Thanks for sharing this information with us! I very much enjoyed your sense of humour as well as how well you simplified this technical info.
I think you can also put it in the sea and listen.
The friend could have connected to this pickup a reverb pedal, of those used in guitars, of the type "Pitch Shifter Delay PS-3 Boss", it would make very cool effects!
Using your dullest drill is best tip!
I made one on bare copper board, in electronics class a few years ago, and it had a lovely distorted sound. I only had a ukulele to try it on, and black metal ukulele is a fantastic combination. Sadly, when I made a proper perf board version, the distortion went away, and now it sounds clean and smooth. What a shame, that noisy mishap was better then expected.
Cool. Thank you.
this is amazing! love your videos and love the message at the end. i've been trying to learn an instrument for years, on and off. it never occurred to me that our skill level or knowledge is irrelevant to enjoy making music until i read "how music works" by david byrne. music is really for everyone in the same way love and food is. we don't discuss talent for those. it's part of being human.
I'll add that to my reading list. I do want to learn more about making music, since I've kind of given up learning how to play an instrument I want to explore the side of music production more.
That book is great.
Have you experimented with different types of surfaces any to see what materials communicate sound more clearly? Plastic, metal, wood, tile, etc...?
Also what materials dampen signal better? Rubber, foam, cork, etc...?
What do you use as a pre-amplifier and amplifier? What audio gain can you achieve? I want to record all the noises that are present in my home ......... . I have several of these 34mm piezo ones and I need to try!!! Any suggestions? Thank you.
Really like the end music. Nice. Thanks
Seriously funky! This is very tempting to try. I kind of wish you had attached one to an elephant though. ;)
I ran out of elephants just before this project, so unfortunately I had to skip that particular test.
@@SwitchAndLever Darn. Maybe next time.
It looks like you're in Giaco Whatever's makerspace, or one similar to it?
He works with Giaco.
Great! What's the five hole holder called, and where can I get it?
The one looking like a piece of Lego Technic, but with screws in it.
SOLVED: Grounding Bar, now I heard it in the video.
Humbly, Ylan
I'm excited to make one. Thank you!
I have piezo disk but i don't have mono Jack cable but i have 3.5mm cable. Can I use 3.5mm cable? And how to do it??? Please reply asap. I want to connect to phone so.
Awesome little project, you got my sub!
Have you tested wiring piezo pickups in series? All the know-how on the internet says to do it in parallel, but I can't find a single comparison of someone actually doing it!
In magnetic pickups in guitars, wiring in series "doubles" the output of a single pickup while parallel halves it; in piezos it also halves it, which is why series sounds so compelling; piezos already have very low output and every bit helps.
I wonder if a flat magnet under the _Puck_ could help to a better contact (on metal)?
Hey!
My choice recording device is my smartphone. So I connected a piezo to a jack then use an adapter (jack - usb c) to connect it on my smartphone. Voice recorder app recognize there is an external microphone and indicate it will record from there. But it doesn’t receive any sound. Do you know what to do?
how would you make a piezo into a speaker? could it be as simple as wiring it to a male 3.5mm jack and plugging it into a mixer? then manipulating the frequencies at different amped up db levels?? curious about that for a personal project...
This is actually a very good tutorial video. Thank you!
You should explain how you changed pitch on the wire and piece of wood to make the melody.
Yessss!!! The song at the end rules!!
that piezo puck looks really useful
I have to admit, that was a pretty clever ad segue haha
I Like the sound the tooth brush makes
I have been seriously considering using the bar-style piezo pickups common for some stringed instruments, and inserting them into hollow tubing vs the more common solid front bar/bridge of a DIY kalimba. I feel thtis may well be an improvement over mounting the round disks on the outside of the body of the kalimba. From your experiments and experience, do you think this concept is way off base, or stands to capture much better signal-to noise?
Edit: I should note I am speciafically considering solid-body kalimba here, as I kinda prefer the decentish (£20 on ali express) solid board styles to hollow bodies.
Double edit: This far I'm largely been cannibalising the bodies of cheap kalimba with ok, but questionable at the high end, tines, and seehing how I can play with the tone using cheap brass (too soft to be long term practical), 'nickel silver' (well, 18% Chinese cupro-nickel like 18th century nickel silver or something) which is a bit soft at 0.8mm still, but tunes without mashing the tines at all and producers lower and more sonorous tones, and beryllium copper/'brass' (which is a pain to work with as it is hard as all hell, but it springs very nicely and similarly producers lower and more mellow tones which I much enjoy). (Both aluminiu and silicon bronze I hope to acquire low cost very soon, too)
I unfortunately have puzzling to do on base material (dense solid wood blocks seem to produce very nice tone, but seem hard to work out where to get cheaply), and which some metal tubing/piping for the front and rear tension bars is a doddle, something for the important third part of the tensioning setup I'm rather clueless in acquiring/making without a lot of cost or tools to do required machining...)
Using a dull drill bit will also maximize the risk to your personal health and safety, so that's a twofer!
If you want to hear something really cool dangle a slinky over a balcony and hold one end to your ear!
trying to make one of these - could I use a 3.5 sourcing map instead of the 3.5 mm audio jack - having trouble figuring this out! thanks
Can we do this for violin bridge to amplify sound
Great video, very enjoyable. Great song at the end :)
in the first one, the black wires are going to the ground? and the white wire goes to tip?
Would love a full album, reminds me of "Human" from Freeform. You have serious talent.
Excellent content. Excellent script and pacing. I truly want to build the stuff I see in your videos.
You're likely gonna wake up one day in the future, though, and wonder what the hell you were thinking with the septum hardware.
But excellent content anyway.
You know what, I am absolutely bewildered how someone can leave such a nice and supportive comment only to do a complete 180 and become offensive and think that your opinion about my life choices, vis a vis my piercings, is in any way welcome. Stop focusing on other people's bodies, it's rude and offensive. I do wonder what the hell you were thinking in writing your comment, it's such an alien thing for me, to even fathom how someone can be so focused on other people like that. It does not sound healthy.
"Septum hardware" is a new term for me. Thank you, might name a band after that in the future.
Creative Genius
That was very cool. Learnt a lot thanks for sharing
The song is awesome
So you connect piezo to any kind of amplifier and tho the speakers ?
very good, thank you
Genius!
A. Why do you want to dampen the higher-frequency sounds?
B. How do you get more than one pitch from plucking the same wire, without changing the length of the wire? Is digital alteration involved?
A) because it causes clipping and the signal doesn’t represent the sound properly, making it appear tinnier than it would otherwise. It’s imbalanced and weighs heavily on the higher frequency side.
B) yes, many of those sounds, like the needle, are pitch shifted in a DAW.
Thank you!
Always well produced videos! So entertaining and instructional. Mahalo for sharing! : )
Cheers!
found you at last very funny but totally informative hopefully will solve my amplifying issues on my harps happy new year from tasmania
Literally no headphone warning for your super loud piezoelectric alarm
The funny thing is, if you actually look at the audio levels the volume of the alarm isn't louder than the peaks during the rest of the video. Just because you imagine it's loud doesn't mean it is. I lowered the volume significantly from the original recording.
@@SwitchAndLever I guess it must be an illusion of the mind lol
@@SwitchAndLever I guess it also could be that my speakers are boosted in that range
Edit headphones
Hiho, I wanted to build this but not exactly like you did it - I solderes the wires to my disc and cut an aux cable in half, now there are three wires coming from the aux but only two coming from the disc and I am unsure how to connect them. The important part ofc is, that my phone accepts the piezo disc as headphones, which it doesn't and this confues me a bit - no matter how I connect the three wires to the two wires
Likely you’re using a stereo cable, which has a wire for the left and the right channel, and one for ground. You could connect the left and right channel wires together to essentially make a mono cable out of it. You may have to use a multimeter to figure out which wire goes to which part of the plug though.
For it to be recognized by your phone I cannot help you though. That is dependent on your phone.
@@SwitchAndLever Thank you for your reply, that must be it.. I'll try to fix it next week and reply back if it works!
So you just need to connect (solder) the wires of the piezo disc to a metal?
Also, do you know how to make a recording device where I can tape the piezo on top of the recording device. I don't want the recorder to be so large.
I appreciate that Anchorman reference.
Electric drums
Excellent video. Excellent music.
Love this channel!!
Kram från Stockholm.
Very very very very good!
I’ve seen that all of contact piezo mics are soldered to mono cables and mono jacks, but it looks here you did it with stereo, am I correct? If so, could I know why?
I’ve been making own (both mono and stereo using single piezos) and to be honest still don’t know if there is benefit or if it useful at all.
I would like to know your opinion.
Loved the video, very inspiring.
Marvelous! I´ve learned a lot with your video! Thank You, very much!
The hot melt glue on the disc (where the solder joints are) will dampen the overall sensitivity majorly. I would suggest not doing that to be honest. The set hot glue is also way to stiff to filter out high frequencies.
Funnily enough I did a lot of testing of this before the video to make sure that I wasn't recommending things that I could not back up. A bare disc and a disc absolutely coated in hot glue like in the puck has a barely perceptible difference in sensitivity. As long as you don't encase both sides in hot glue but make sure that the piezo disc has good contact to the substrate (i.e. the wood or the aluminium in this video) you'll be absolutely fine.
Awesome stuff! 😃👍🏻👊🏻
seems fun. btw, what is the black device on left side 05:37?
It's an audio recorder.
The real question is where’d you get that tomagatchi? I let mine starve to death back in ‘97-would like a mulligan 👀
So cool! I learned a bunch from this, thanks for sharing!
Nice! I think, i "must" built this ;-)
But, i think allso it is maybee better to connect the twoo Piezo Disks seperatly with the Left and Right Channel.
Why?
@@SwitchAndLever I think it would give a stereo like effect
@@Schwertmaid nope, it would just be the same signal, but at slightly different frequencies as the different sized piezos have slightly different ranges. There really wouldn't be much point.
very cool project! :-)
Can someone make a “10 hour of switch and lever dancing” video, please? Thank you
I don't think that would be good for the general sanity of the internet.
excuse me. I want ask something about the piezo standalone. Can I record the sound in my computer with that thing? thankyou
Why use a dull drill bit?
Hi thank you very much indeed for this very interesting video. I wonder how much the material of the box will impact the sound. I would like to build a pickup to be used in an electric guitar ... i think that finding the oprimal placement of these piezo disks will take a lot of time A lot of trials. Regards, gino
Thanks for this great video, it helped me!
looking for a full range contact mic for a double bass on what size should I go?
'the dullest drill bit you have', of course, we're all professionals here...
Yo bro i want contacts mic for zoom h1n is it suitable? And piezoelectric i can get on old watch and so on?
I need 3.5 mm mini jack so it doesn’t matter?
great!
7:34 So you want make it as bad recording device as possible, because post processing is impossible?
Post processing isn't impossible, but why post process something that harshly is clipping when you can fix it by design instead? You're basically making the case that you should play an untuned guitar because you can just fix it in post anyway.
@@SwitchAndLever You should tune your guitar but you should not need to tune your microphone? Because now I wonder if the voice quality from your throat was so poor because of limitations of the piezo element or due to your dampening attempts. Simple lower pass filtering should be enough to get rid of unwanted high frequencies, right?
@@woowooNeedsFaith it's because it's a contact microphone, and the piezo itself wasn't really designed to be a microphone at all. You could literally scream at it from a foot away and it wouldn't pick up anything, but put against the jawbone when speaking and it will. Of course it's dampened quite a bit by the muscles, skin and tendons in between. You may want to read up a bit on what makes contact microphones different from things like condenser or dynamic microphones.
Wish I can connect this to audio interface for recording directly in a music daw
Can’t see why you couldn’t. It works essentially like a microphone would.
How about a video telling how to add a volume slider for this, so we can put it inside guitars?
You should have a volume knob on your amplifier, use that.
The cable you use , is that mini Jack to mini Jack ? Or it's big jack to big jack ....?
Grtz Ivar
How was the shaker made? Piezo on the outside of the tin?
Yes, it's the puck pickup I made, just held on the underside of a box of mínts.