Or a pressure switch? But yeah, you might be right. Piezo trigger playing back a sampled kick sound maybe? But then, so is my playing, so at least Stompy and I will have that in common :) They don’t miss, 200 for a smaller one up to 400 for one of the bigger ones, yikes!Īnything I build is likely to be very inconsistent. I've heard the 'Puck' ones and they still fell short of the Wolftone/Wild Dog brand.

I have no idea what the electronics were because the builder (from Byron Bay) would not tell anyone what the secret sauce was and drilled out all the screw heads after he assembled them. We played pubs, theatres and festivals all around Australia and it always sounded great.Ī lot of the DIY and old school stompboxes I saw were inconsistent in their performance, could be prone to feedback and as I said before, lacked big bottom. The Bigfoot could sound huge and the guitar player ran it through a 10 band EQ into a 15' sub. My point is that (most) every other stompbox I heard, sounded real 'clicky' with no real THUMP like you'd expect from a bass drum. (now called Wild Dog following some lengthy legal issues) The best thing I ever heard was the Bigfoot by Wolftone. I played in touring duos and trios that used a stompbox instead of a drummer. A self-contained stomp box sub-woofer thingy. Make the wooden box large enough to house a small 386-based amp (like a noisy cricket or something modded for bass) and a speaker. Given my lack of a bass amp, I have a new idea. And I found some piezo transducers for under $10 on eBay, so experiments seem likely. And I have an LM386 headphone amp that I built a few years ago that could maybe drive a speaker or the headphone input on my amp, at least for experimenting. You don't want a long sustain and you don't want it so resonant that you get acoustic feedback when you apply a bit of volume. But a pickup style unit will need a thinnish top that can resonate - at least a bit. Most piezo-style kick blocks I believe are pretty solid as you really just want the 'thump' of the wood as your foot hits it. No need for a preamp or high impedance input then. Single coils will probably be better as they have less mid-range emphasis. Just use whatever's handy/spare/cheapest. So a guitar pickup will pick up just as much bass end. There's nothing inherently different between a guitar and a bass pickup except the number of coils and the coil spacing. I'm not sure a guitar amp is the best amp to use for such a pedal, as a lot of bass and a fast attack transient could give a lot more speaker cone travel than it's designed for if used at any volume.

So any wire should be kept as short as possible. The high impedance means that the output lead is very prone to picking up noise, and any capacitance will roll off the top end quite quickly. For a bass drum sound, you need a fair bit of low end, around the 80-100Hz area, and some high frequency punch around 3kHz, and a bit of a cut in the mids. I'd suggest looking for a preamp with a mid control as well, as that is very important for shaping the sound. But too low an input impedance and the bass end will be missing, too high and you get a lot more bass (which is really what you want with a kick pedal). I have no idea what makes the difference. Some piezos work best with 1-2 meg ohm input impedances, some are better at 10 meg. As the input impedance is stated as 2.2 Meg, then it looks like a piezo design, but with some wrong descriptive words. Ideally 5-10 meg ohms for most piezos for the flattest response. Whereas a piezo hates DC and needs a high input impedance. It says it's designed to work with electret condenser mic systems, but those need DC power supplied to them and a low input impedance. I really don't get the description of the preamp. Or I could build a 2 channel mono mixer, but I am worried about adding extra noise into my main signal.ĭoes anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? Any advice or suggestions? If not I could run a simple headphone amp after the pre-amp. I only have one amp, and don't really want to use a mixer to blend this into my guitar signal so I am hoping that the preamp output will have a suitable level to go into the aux input on my THR.

I can probably manage something functional but ugly. I just wish my woodworking skills were up to making something fancy. This circuit might be overkill (), but I have all the components and the volume, bass, and treble controls might be handy for shaping the sound. I have seen people wire them as a passive circuit with just a volume pot which I will try first, but if I need to massage the output a bit more I will build a piezo preamp and wire it into the wooden box. I am thinking of picking up a cheap piezo transducer on eBay, and putting it into a wooden foot drum/stomp box sort of thing. I am hatching a plan for a new pedal build, but something different this time.

Diy make your own piezo pickups