Homemade Piezo Microphone

As a guitar player, I wanted a cheap and easy way of building my own Piezo Microphone.
They are simple to make and attach easily to the acoustic guitar. The sounds is clear and there's a lot of place to experiment with these.

Of course, you can use this project with most of your acoustic instrument!

• Soldering Iron (of course to solder)
• Piezo Disk Microphone
• 1/4'' male connector (guitar jack)
• Audio cable (shielded + Signal wire)
• Blue putty (to hold the piezo on your instrument, this is the safest way I found since it won't damage the wood)

The process is fairly easy, if you want, you may watch the whole video since it's pretty educative or simply skip to the step-by-step assembling:

The piezo disk comes with a red and a black wire attach to it by default.

If it's not the case because you scavenge it (good job!), the center part of the disk is the ''signal'' and the external part will be soldered to the shield or negative of your cable.

Solder one end of the cable carefully on the disk since it is pretty sensitive to heat.

Solder the other end of the cable to the jack. Checkout the diagram if you're not sure.

The process is fairly easy, the piezo can be connected directly into a power amp or a pre-amp or even a recorder/sound card.

Make sure you adjust the gain to the minimum when plugging these because the volume can be pretty aggressive.

I use some 'hot glue' or epoxy to secure the soldering on the piezo disk. This will reduce the stress from the solder joint on the disk.

Once it's done, you can place the piezo on any surface and you should be able to hear the vibration or impact on that surface.

There is an easy way to isolate fully these piezo disk and make them waterproof, you can find some info here:

I hope you enjoyed this easy process and let me know how yours sound!

You will notice that there are tons of different kind of piezo disk out there and each one will react differently and tho, will sound a bit different. Time to experiment!