Are you getting tired of that expensive studio mic sound? Maybe you should try a
mic made out of garbage.
Now that's music.
Hey everyone, today I'm gonna do
something a bit different than my normal costume making tutorials. Today I'm gonna
try and make a guitar pickup from an old watch, and make sure you hang around to
the end of the video because I'm going to be taking my fancy guitar pickup to a
real live recording studio to see what they think. Let's make it.
The main ingredient in this project is a piezoelectric disk or "piezo" for short.
What most people don't realize is that every time you wake up in the morning,
burn your toast, or wear an annoying musical tie, there's a piezo disc in
there making its magic. When an electric signal is applied to a piezo it causes
it to flex which can cause vibrations also known as sounds. Now that's pretty
cool, but what's cooler is if you flex the piezo disc it will produce an
electric current which can then be amplified. I already mentioned a few
places piezos can be found in the wild but I think the easiest and best place
to get one is in the back of an old digital watch, so I grabbed my little
screwdriver and opened it up. The great thing about using a watch is
the piezo disc is already mounted on the back plate which will protect it from
flexing too much and possibly breaking when we try stick it on our guitar. The
other thing I need is a way to get the signal from the pickup into an amp.
Handily I happen to have a box called cords cables, and in that box I found a
quarter inch mono jack that had apparently been cut in half at some
point. Now all I had to do is solder the jack on to the piezo. However, solder
doesn't like to stick to the stainless steel watch back so I grabbed some
copper wire that was just a little bit thicker than the screw holes and filed
it down until it wasn't thicker than the screw holes.
I cut the copper wires so there was about a millimeter protruding on each
side and grabbed my grandpa's little anvil. I used a ball-peen hammer to
mushroom the end of the copper wire on one side, then I flipped over the watch
back and mushroomed the other side as well. Now that little piece of copper is
held firmly in place and it gives a great spot to solder to. I got out my
soldering iron, some solder, and some flux. I found the trickiest bit was soldering
to the back of the piezo itself. There's a thin silver layer on the back of the
piezo and that's what you have to solder to, so I had to get in and out really
quick, otherwise the metal backing would kind of melt and peel away from the
piezo. I put a blob of solder on the back of the piezo and on my little
smushed copper wire.
I used some wire strippers to remove the outer jacket
around the wire, bundled all the loose wires together and stripped a little bit
of the jacket off the center wire. I checked to make sure the wires would reach
their appropriate blobs of solder, twisted the loose ones together and cut
it to length. I tinned the two wires with solder and carefully and quickly
soldered them on to the two solder blobs on the watch back. And that's it!
Add a little blue tack and it's time to test it out.
All right I'm heading into
Moonrise Music Club recording studio today and I'm gonna meet up with a guy
named Rusty. He's a sound engineer music recording guy who also plays lots
of instruments. Anyways I asked him if I could show him my pickup that I made so
he said yes and so I'm gonna go in and see if it's any good.
>Yello >C: Hey, how's it goin?
>Good man how are you? Are you filming me right now? >C: I'm totally filming you
>okay great well, how ya doin? Good to meet ya. This is exciting!
>Alright so here's what I got >Okay
>This.
>Wow.
>That is so simple >I'll teach ya how to make one
>Yeah okay, great >it's super easy
>Let's try it out
>Let's plug it into something
>Okay so where would you stick it? >C: I would recommend, like from my tests so far...
>That seems to get the most juice?
>C: That seems to get the least amount of, um, too much of something
>You know what, I say that to musicians all the time: Play more of less of that.
>Oh man (guitar strum) look at that signal. Holy cow.
>C: Is that good or bad? >That's great!
(guitar plays)
>Okay so I just made that up... I didn't do any level testing
>Seriously, this isn't movie magic
>C: This is straight out of the can > I have no idea what this is gonna sound like
(guitar music plays)
>That's incredible man! >C: Is that good?
>Yeah! That's amazing!
> Lloyd, you hear that?
>Did you see it?
>Look at this!
>(laughs) it's barely even on! Wow.
>Oh my God we're gonna have so much fun today.
>Let's see how quickly we can make a nice sounding song with this pick up.
(Guitar music)
>What we should do is record a second guitar over top of that
maybe I should do a picking thing
(guitar picking music)
>Something like that
>Let's quickly see how that sounds
(guitar music plays)
>Let's see if we can find a bass that makes sense
>Let's just throw it on this precision bass! Maybe it'll do nothing.
>C: How's it gonna work on that?
>I have no idea
(Rusty plays bass)
>It's amazing! You can really hear the, like.. >The string
> You can hear the string... it sounds really natural. It's amazing!
(Drum plays along with guitar and bass)
>Hey, that's not bad!
>What we need..ooh >C: What do we need?
>Would tambourine work somehow?
(tambourine plays) Look at that signal!
Wow! What a neat sound.
Oh my god that sounds awesome!
Where would you suggest?
>C: My professional piano miking experience? Is that what you're asking for?
(piano plays)
There's no EQ or anything. That's straight into the computer
(piano plays with other recorded instruments)
(Phone rings)
>That you? >C: Nope its you.
> Hello, Rusty Mattius speaking
Oh hi Sierra Noble...
uh...award winning fiddle player and singer-songwriter.
So how do you feel about coming down and playing some violin?
Ten minutes of your time
>So I've seen pickups kind of like this >C: Right
>but not made out of the back of a watch
This is a pretty fancy pickup
it's directly in the bridge >C: Oh okay, yeah
>so it has like actually four pickups in the bridge for each string
and then it's especially mixed for violin
>C: So probably not as good as my watch back one
>No but I think this is gonna be really cool
I'm gonna try it in different spots
(recorded tambourine plays) >Like that's literally just on the tambourine.
I'm holding it >That's so cool.
(violin plays)
>Yeah, that was great.
(recorded violin plays)
>And there's no EQ on these yet. At all. >That's no EQ yet?
>No that is straight from the watch back
>That's great. >C: Perfect, beautiful
>yeah that's gonna sound really really great
>C: So cool, thank you so much for coming in >That was so fun
I want one! >R: yeah we're all gonna get one.
>C: I'll make a whole bunch and send 'em out
>S: Yay! >C: Totally
So what do you think?
>Well, I think that it's frustrating that it's works so well. It's great.
It's frustratingly good that...so quickly we threw this on an acoustic guitar
and it sounded very pure, like it really picks up the pure vibrations.
I love it
I'm totally gonna use it regularly yeah
and anybody can make this > Yeah.
>anybody can make this and do pretty much what you can do with really really
expensive microphones. It's very impressive.
>Cuz Rusty, you didn't do any like really fancy stuff on your thing, right? like you
>Everything you hear on this recording is... there's a little bit of EQ,
but essentially it's directly an electronic signal from this vibrating on
the instrument directly into Pro Tools or Logic or whatever program you're using.
>Garage Band >Anybody could make this sound like that with this, yes.
>So there ya go, look at that, heh. >Heh.
>How long did it take us? What time did we start? 11:43 it was.
>Its 3:19 and it sounds like this now (full song plays)
>Everything was done with that. There was nothing that was not done with that, right?
>Yeah. It makes me happy, thanks! >All right we're done.
>Just like that!
So it is the middle of the night right now and I am re-recording this
last section of the video because I got some really exciting news today and I
just totally wanted to share it with you. So I got an email from Rusty today and
he finished off the recording that we did together, but not only that he added
vocals and lyrics and honestly it sounds amazing. So if you'd like to hear that
finished song I'll have a link here that'll take you to his youtube channel
so you can watch it. And make sure you leave him some nice comments, maybe
subscribe to his channel. He's a super talented guy, both at playing and
recording music and he's just really super nice too so it's definitely
worth listening to because you'll be amazed - especially the vocals -
he did them by singing into a guitar with this attached
on the guitar and they sound really, really good. I'll have the link up here
and if it's not here I'll also include it in a pinned comment in the comments
so that you can find it. And a huge thanks to both Rusty and Sierra for making this
project way more fun than it would have been if I had stayed in my basement.
Thanks for watching. See ya
Now go check out Rusty's channel. You won't regret it.