After making a kalimba with an acoustic hole I still needed to amplify the sound being made so I was thinking about using a guitar pick up like a humbucker or something. I saw an example in Nicolas Collins book Handmade Electronic Music where he used a guitar pick up and took all the plastic off and then attached it to a little amplifier to pick up electro magnetic radiation and I thought this would work for the kalimba like it would a guitar. But after a quick test holding it up against my electric guitar I realized this wouldn’t work. In a discussion with guitarist I found out I would need a transducer pick up like the ones found in resonator (Steel) guitars. These are quite expensive so brought a little Cherub pick up microphone from ebay, this just clips into the acoustic hole of a guitar and you can plug it into your amp. 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 3:43 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.