i can get tune-o-matic bridges pretty cheap on ebay and i have piezo rod pickups, is there a way to use the rod style pickup in one of the cheap chinese bridges?
stew mac and others want nearly $200 for their piezo bridges which seems crazy. anyone here build their own?
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You can do a really quick mockup to see if it works, if you have a TOM bridge and a rod piezo. Take an already strung up TOM bridge git, wire up your rod piezo to a jack, and plug that into an amp. Place the piezo rod on the bridge, holding it down lightly with one or two fingers against the bridge, while strumming the unplugged git with your other hand. See if you get a sound. If you do (and you should), then all ya gotta do is attach the rod to the bridge somehow. You could unscrew all the saddles, and see if there is enough room inside the base of the bridge to carve a channel to fit the rod into, so that the saddles sit directly atop the rod. That's only if you want a really finished look. Otherwise, you can just tape or glue the rod to the bridge, like I suggested earlier.
this is gonna sound dumb but i just remembered my six string ibanez has this same bridge on it. i never play it so i had forgotten all about it! anyway im gonna do what you suggested and do some experimenting with it tomorrow
ok this is gonna sound even dumber but my ibanez didnt have the tune-o-matic bridge on it. i dont know what i was thinking (told you its been a while since i played it!) however it has some similar. its like a t-o-m bridge except its one piece instead of having the seperate tail piece and the strings wrap around from the front.
i went ahead and experimented with it and found that while the pickup does register the vibrations while holding the piezo directly onto the bridge its no where near as loud as if the strings were putting pressure directly on the elements. basically i dont think the idea of taping the rod underneath the t-o-m bridge would work very well
i think im just gonna get one of the cheap TOM bridges and play around with it some more. im curious how to go about using one of the rod piezos cut into seperate pieces. i took one of the elements apart and it was just the little ceramic or whatever element wrapped in metal with heat shrink around it. seems you could solder wires to each indidual element and get it to work but im not sure
probably be easier just to stick a disc piezo inside the box and call it done
You may want to also experiment with strips of disk piezo in both series and parallel. Disk piezo has a very high resistance. This is part of why passive tone controls are difficult. Here you have the opportunity of putting 6 strips in parallel and dramatically dropping the resistance.
Example, 2 x 8 ohm speakers + 1 x 4 Ohm speaker:
Wired in Series: 20 Ohms
Wired in Parallel: 2 Ohms
Here is a page showing the calculation:
http://physics.bu.edu/py106/notes/Circuits.html
can i use 24 guage speaker wire to wire up piezo discs? did a search here and google but didnt get a definitive answer
I believe that is exactly what I am using all the time.
The thicker the wire, the harder it is going to be to fit in tight places ... but .... the lower the resistance.
The rod works better from direct string contact from a saddle on it, i`d go with individual piezo disc`s glued on the string saddles then all wired together to one cable. Usually the high end strat style fixed bridges with piezo`s have some type of disc of film imbedded into them. That`s why their big bucks...alot of fine detail wirring. http://www.ebay.com/itm/LR-Baggs-T-Bridge-Tune-o-Matic-Electric-Gui...
You are right, of course, but BW was sounding like he was trying to save some coin...
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