I've recently been considering how best to amplify my mandolin on a budget that unfortunately won't stretch to the DPA 4099v by a long way. After reading somewhere that homemade guitar pickups could be made with piezo transducers, I picked up a few from a hardware store for about a dollar each, and decided to experiment a bit. I cut a guitar lead in half, tied/taped the connections to it, put it in a preamp, taped the piezo roughly to the mandolin, and to my suprise instead of getting some humming/crackling, got very little noise and something clearly resembling a stringed instrument being played.
Yes, at the moment it's far from sounding like i'd like, and does suffer from the problem common to pickups that it sounds too electric, and not acoustic enough, but I've been suprised how well it worked for about a dollar and 10 minutes effort, and wonder how much better I can get it by experimenting with placement on the instrument, with multiple piezos, with soldering leads instead of taping them etc.
I know even with hours of work I'm probably not going to get it sounding as good as the cheapest of Piezo systems, but enjoy trying stuff like this for the fun of it and for what I'll learn as much as for the savings.
I'm sure I can't be the only one to have tried this, what with it being so cheap and easy to try, but can't seem to find any threads on it (which is not to say they don't exist); Anyone else got any experience / tips on this?