Ukulele with Optical Pickup

DanielHulbert

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 19, 2010
Messages
357
Reaction score
1
What should you do when microphone, piezo, and wound pickups become passé? Try an optical pickup. :D

This rudimentary Infrared String Bass from MAKE Magazine gave me the idea to make a ukulele with an optical pickup.

photo 1.jpg

The heart of this instrument is a normal cigar box ukulele. I opted to go with untraditional tuner placement to go along with the overall funky stylings of this ukulele.

photo 3.jpg

photo 2.jpg

One 9 volt battery supplies the power for the green power indicator LED, as well as the 4 infrared emitter and 4 infrared collector diodes.

The pickup works when the vibrating strings interrupt the signal between the emitter and the collector diodes.

This was a fun project, but in the end this is an overly complicated alternative to using a piezo element. :)



See it in action!

 
Optical pickups have been around for decades now, and they are fantastic high school level science projects. There is not one single advantage that they have over individual string piezo pickups, and there are many disadvantages. The "gee-whizz" factor is huge; the practical benefits as a real world pickup are few.

Been there, done that...back when I ran Gibson's West Coast R&D labs (1989-'90), we had the Photon guitar synth system that used optical pickups. Then there was Lightwave. And there were at least two other optical systems before that. They need light shields which cover the strings, and if a photographer's strobe goes off in the neighborhood, expect speaker cones to be launched with great force!
 
My inner geek loves this :)
 
Top Bottom