I was reminded today about a promise I made quite a few months ago. I said I’d post a review of how my Stagg sounds now that I’ve got my piezo fitted. Well here it is…
Planet of the Ukes |
Apologies for taking so long to do this.
For those who have forgotten, I fitted a piezo and UK-2000 pre-amp to my Stagg US-10 soprano ukulele in December 2011. The fitting itself wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it might be. I made a few schoolboy errors, but on the whole things went according to plan. Right away though I was being critical of the sound I was getting out of the amp. My verdict was that I had a grounding problem and I joked about a solution involving underpants.
I haven’t done a great deal with this since. As you will all know, I’ve been far too busy building my electric ukulele.
A couple of you out there are considering starting a similar project and have asked for more info on the sound. I figured the best thing to do was to knock together a quick video. Don’t be too critical of the playing… some of these snippets are of tunes I’ve never actually played on the uke before.
For this sound check I was playing through a Line-6 amplifier and recording on my Zoom R16. I didn’t have any effects on the Line-6. Two of the snippets have no effects at all and the rest have flavours of distortion.
The verdict is that I still have a noise problem which I’m putting down to the cheap pre-amp. If I was to do this project again I would go for a more expensive pre-amp – especially if I was putting it into an expensive uke.
On the clean sounding snippets the background sound isn’t too noticeable, but once distortion is added everything multiplies up. I’m sure I could have got a better sound for a number of these if I’d spent more time, but the intention here is to give you a real demo of what it sounds like. On a couple of the heavier numbers I even had to break out my anti-static wristband!
Here’s the video… let me know what you think…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Per-B7vgN0]