Piccies of 10 string Kantele

[The Dong]

Tony Hardie-Bick wrote:
> LOL :) For gluing these things to wood, you need to use epoxy resin. If you can 
> somehow clamp 'em down to test the sound (well, I've actually held them in place 
> with fingers to test, but it's pretty tricky to get the necessary pressure).

The block of wood you see in the pictures has a channel underneath for 
the old tender. This block is DS taped in, not the piezo (OK, I give up 
on the coin theme) The piezo is wedged hard against the wood with a shim 
of dense foam and pulls out easily. Once I'm happy with the position, I 
might use epoxy or one shot resin to finalise. Another option is to fit 
two and have a switch to choose position, just like a multi pickup 
guitar, but I don't think it would make very much difference.

> Yeah - tis a bugger. On the secret instrument that I've done all this on, I had 
> to build a MOSFET switch-on circuit so I could use a standard stereo socket for 
> switching AND stereo out.

Any diagrams? I can't quite figure that out in my current state.
A secret instrument? What is it secreting? ;)

> Also, these piezos need a fairly high impedance, >50K, preferably 100K, to avoid 
> rolling off the low frequencies, but it sounds like you already got that 
> covered. They're basically capacitors driving a resistance, so RC HPF rules 
> apply (perhaps you already know all this stuff - apologies if you do).

I have a few circuits, all with some megohms input impedance.
The jack socket in the pictures is actually the buffer amplifier too, a 
shadow piezo preamp. Cheap Chinese stuff.

> Gotta say, sounds like gold already. All this science can only make it worse ;)

That's with some very careful Eq'ing on the digimuckster, flat EQ'd it's 
not anywhere near nice.

> Man, I love the sound of those Kantele strings. Really the music of steel and 
> wood, writ large :)

It's nice,  but I just know the 15 string, or larger concert Kantele 
would have been a better project ;)

(I really, really wanted to build a medium sized concert harp, or a 
complex autoharp, or even a hurdi-gurdi tweaked my interest, but also 
know these things are a few steps beyond my skills, materials and time 
just now.)

Maybe next time, after I've made more tools...