Which low priced transducer would work for under the neck? This of course to pick up the slap sound. I know the k&k clicky is about $65... is anyone using something else that works well? I've been seing some for around $15-$20. I've heard of using drum triggers for this. Ultimately I want to get the whole K&K setup, but right now I'm going to try running both into my Zoom A3. It has a piezo and a mic input with separate controls. I figure I'd probably run the transducer thru a cheap eq to roll off any unwanted frequencies before hitting the preamp. Thank you!
The neck pickups are almost all piezo disks that have the ceramic side with the connections covered in some black plastic or something similar. The covering helps to keep the soldered parts on the ceramic. So basically any piezo disk pickup including drum triggers and DIY piezo disk pickups (i.e. with an epoxy covering) should work.
BTW, I already have a piezo on the bridge. I saw some cheap ones online and guess I could just pick one with good reviews and try it. Since it doesn't have to capture tge same resonance as the bridge pickup, it should be fine provided the wiring is good. Thank you!
You may want to look at Vic's Pickups. It sounds like at this point in time you want a Model A, which is a stand-alone fingerboard pickup ($25). It should not require a pre-amp by itself. For my piezo system I'm using a Vic's Model C which includes both the bridge wing and fingerboard pickup wired together with a 1/4" stereo output plug (TRS). I have this feeding into a DB-mounted K&K Dual Channel Pro ST blending pre-amp. I can highly recommend Vic's (Zac Viictor) for service, design, quality and price.
If you connect the bridge pickup and the neck pickup passively (without an individual impedance buffer) the sound quality of the bridge pickup will suffer. So use a double impedance buffer with mixing the outputs of the two buffers.
You can make your own with a piezo doorbell buzzer for $10 or less at a hardware store. Pull the elemnt out of the housing, solder a shielded lead to it and attach it to the neck. It's not like you need high fidelity for a click pickup. {}
Even tough it is basically correct, the piezo disk itself is cheaper if you find a source for it. But a buzzer doesn‘t need a shielded cable whereas using it with an unshielded cable, even if it is for a few inches only can lead to picking up electrical noise. So the shielded cable needs to be soldered to the piezo disk (no longer than one second on the silver plated ceramic) and the ceramic side needs to be covered with epoxy to avoid separation of the soldering point at the ceramic which will separate the silver plating from the ceramic. So for many users a secured shielded cable piezo disk (like a drum pickup) might be the easier solution and probably worth a bit more money. Nothing wrong with DIY, but in the end it might not that much cheaper and can take some time and experiments until a robust version is made.
I normally like DIY, but my soldering skills might wind up costing me more than the Vic' pickup that dhergert recommended above. It's a good idea and yes, it just needs to pickup the click. Thanks!
I second the Vic’s Model A. I have the Model C that has one paired with the bridge wing pickup. Zac Victor makes great pickups for a great price.
All of the recommendations here are great. Like @jdh3000, my confidence in my DIY electronic skills, beyond reading specs and plugging things in, is very low. Vic's pickups do have a few advantages over anything I could make though, the biggest being that they work and Zac guarantees them or he'll fix them. But also, Zac is a RaB performer and he has designed his pickups to meet those requirements.
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