King Uke has also fitted a piezo pickup to his £11 Stagg US-10 Ukulele.
My inspiration was a series of posts stuck up by Electric Ukulele Land on the Electric Ukulele Land website. After some words of encouragement and a few pointers from Julian Davies I got onto ebay and ordered the pickup: a UK-2000… from Hong Kong.
It arrived this morning!
Here are a load of photos taken at various points throughout the day. Some are a bit blurred, but I’ve stuck them up anyway… I keep forgetting about the ‘macro’ setting on the camera 🙂
And no, this isn’t something I’ve done before, so I could no doubt have done things differently. I’ll call out where I think that I could have done better.
Here is the pre-amp. The UK-2000 has a low battery indicator, Treble, Bass and Volume controls. A battery was included along with 4 screws to attach it to the body. |
And here we have the jack with the washer and bolt for securing to the body |
For completeness, here’s a shot of the pickup. It’s advertised as a “SPIRAL PIEZO CABLE PICKUP”. And top left and right are a cable tie and fastener. I didn’t use them in the end. |
I tested the pickup before I went any further…
I don’t think that there is any convention for where you place the pre-amp, but you can see here. The face-plate on the UK-2000 is contoured and a perfect match for ‘the hips’ of the body. |
I had to cut the body to fit the pre-amp. This had me sweating, so I went a bit over the top trying to get it right. First I cut a template in card… |
I taped the wood all round where I wanted to put the pre-amp, and then taped the template on top of that… |
Next up, I tacked the bridge. I took off the strings and popped out the plastic. |
I masked the ends of the bridge and lowered the hole beneath where the plastic sits – this is where the pickup goes. Then I drilled a hole in the body for the pickup itself. |
Next I fitted the Jack. I stuck on a bit of masking tape, marked and drilled a hole. And I got the hole too small and had to file it! Damn! |
Like a fool, I removed the masking to do the filing and look what happened! I was cursing at this point. Getting the Jack screwed in place was the most difficult part of this whole project for me. |
And the very last thing to do was to fit some strings. The first set of Aquilas that I’ve fitted myself. |
The strings are colour-coded. Come on Aquila… think about your poor unfortunate colour-blind ukers! |
And here’s the final product… |
Beautiful! |
I haven’t done much with it yet so can’t really comment on the sound. I’ll maybe blog on that another day…
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Man, inspiring job Here, i have just ordered my uk-2000 pick up, and looking forward to install it on a Lanikai Lu-21p, any update on the sound of this baby?
Dan, Dan, DAN! I am so sorry it has taken me this long to reply. I didn’t know there was a comment! I did record one song with this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRpZj5ivI8U), but there’re so many effects on it that it’s hard to tell. I’ll look into doing a sound check for you. Thanks for your comment. I’m need to get notifications set up on this blog so I don’t miss comments in the future. If I can get something up today I will…
Dan, I’m in the process of getting my review up on Electric Ukulele Land. If you can’t wait, then you can see it here (on my other blog) http://theukuleleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/stagg-us-10-soprano-ukulele-meets-uk.html