Amplifying my 'Ukulele

I love my Doane clone baritone the only baritone I own.
If there's one negative about this 'ukulele it is that it's not very loud. During my daily surfs thru eBay I came across this active pickup kit for 'ukuleles that has all the pieces needed at a very reasonable price. I was wondering if anyone here has tried this setup before. For $13.00 it looks like a small investment to experiment with. What say you?
Mahalo for the input.

My Doan Clone Baritone


eBay Active Pickup Kit
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110557729355&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Ahnko Honu said:

I love my Doane clone baritone the only baritone I own.
If there's one negative about this 'ukulele it is that it's not very loud. During my daily surfs thru eBay I came across this active pickup kit for 'ukuleles that has all the pieces needed at a very reasonable price. I was wondering if anyone here has tried this setup before. For $13.00 it looks like a small investment to experiment with. What say you?
Mahalo for the input.

My Doan Clone Baritone

eBay Active Pickup Kit
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110557729355&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Click to expand...

Aloha Ahnko,
I know those baritones were once going for 20 ot 30 dollars before what a deal...good idea
to put in a pick-up...let us know how it sounds afterwards.....pretty good deal for about
50 bucks....MM Stan...

wow... are you spying on me? I just finished a poor man's U-bass using those same pieces... well plus a few more for the bass part (Ashbory tuners and Pahoehoe strings and some elbow grease). Sure the pickup probably isn't the best for bass duty, but for me, cheap is better... and it turned out okay.

the pickup works pretty good. I suspect it would be fine for baritine uke duty... just don't mount it on the sound board like i did. the pickup preamp part has a flexible frame that allows mounting to a flat or curved surface... i thought it would look cool in front on the sound board AND it would be helpful with getting the strings in the holes i drilled for the bass setup... anyways long story short, the preamp part physically clears the space when mounted on the soundboard BUT with the cables plugged in it doesn't... i had to do some fancy soldering to fix my situation. now I'm okay... save yourself some hassle and mount the thing on the side like it would normally be. the under saddle transducer thingy is not round like a lot of others, it's flat like a ribbon... and it barely fits the slot with some pushing... the size and flatness made getting it through kinda tricky. the hole needs to be pretty much as thick as the width of the saddle so be carefully... luckily the bridge material on these ukes is the natural color of the wood (not painted or stained) so if you get a bit messy like i did, it's not that noticeable. I might suggest mounting the preamp in a spot that would help with fishing the under saddle transducer ribbon thru. another thing to consider... i found out after I installed the output jack, that having it anywhere on the end makes standing the uke on its end difficult. so if you are used to standing this uke up when putting it down. think about where the jack should go.

here's some pics of the early stages of my poor man's u-bass...

Any chance of some more pics of your bass, I'm in the process of building something similar. A video would be good too.

Clifford said:

Any chance of some more pics of your bass, I'm in the process of building something similar. A video would be good too.

Click to expand...

Sure... I was eventually planing to post an actual thread with more pics but I'm lazy... I'll see if I can get something up sooner than I would normally.