Can't get Misi pickup to work right

I've installed a Misi pickup in a new build and I am so pissed off right now because now that everything is finished and ready to ship I found out that something has happened with the pickup.
I plugged it in for one final listen and it is almost completely non-functional. It is extremely quiet and completely muffled.
Of course, the first thing I thought of was the saddle. So I removed it and made sure it was good on the bottom and not to tight in the saddle, but it did no good.
If I touch the pickup wire from the inside, or outside, it barely creates any signal at all. It almost seems like the electronics aren't working right.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be wrong or how I can correct it? I'm desperate!

~Fred

Does this pickup use the remote charger? If so, you might check to be sure the charger is functioning?

Gary Gill said:

Does this pickup use the remote charger? If so, you might check to be sure the charger is functioning?

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That was my first thought, charge it up.

This was my first experience, It turned out it just needed a good charge and all worked fine.

Might I respectfully suggest that one read instructions before, during, and after doing jobs like this? It really helps to understand the scope of what you're doing before plunging in.

Rick Turner said:

Might I respectfully suggest that one read instructions before, during, and after doing jobs like this? It really helps to understand the scope of what you're doing before plunging in.

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I know, Rick, and I humbly bow to your expertise and experience in all things uke. I will admit that I tend to get excited and work faster than my mind can work sometimes. Also, this was my first under-saddle installation and I may have underestimated the difficulty. But I did charge and plug in the pickup before installation just to make sure it worked, and it did. I followed the instructions included with the pickup, including the 50/50 rule. I even followed your advice from another thread where you showed how to secure the extra wire with tiny zip ties. But for some reason, when I plugged it in at the very end, the sound is almost completely non-existent.
What the others here are saying about the charge sounds right, so I now have it charging up and I will try it again after a while to see if that works.
Thank you and all of the others who have responded. I'll let you know what happens!

I've got one and I thought it only took 30 seconds to a minute to charge?

Also, FYI - I botched my install and sent it back to Mike at Mainland who fixed it. At least one of the problems was the proximity of the excess wire to the pickup electronics, and the way I wrapped and secured the excess wire and where I secured it.

It came back with the excess wire fastened to the back of the intrument. I had tried to hide it by fastening under the soundboard toward the bottom of the uke.

If one is skilled at soldering and wiring details, can the wire be shortened? Or is there a capacitance issue?

You could shorten just the lead out portion of the cable, but not the actual pickup element unless you really know what you're doing with these. The actual element is made by Lloyd Baggs for MiSi. I've had them apart; I'm pretty skilled at working with piezo pickups. I would not advise anyone to tear into one unless you don't mind failure and buying new elements. Capacitance is not an issue with these; if anything, output will be better with optimized lead out length. But 100% shielding with proper grounding is of paramount importance. The elements "look into" an extremely high input impedance in the on-board preamp; if you don't follow proper procedures, you'll get a lot of hum.

BTW, I've been designing magnetic pickups for guitar and bass for 45 years and piezo pickups for all kinds of stringed instruments for about 25 years. I know this stuff in my sleep. It's all about geometry once you get past the proper electronic interface issues; it's about force event vectors.

Thank you Rick

Are you using bone for a saddle or something with less density? Is it perfectly flat on the bottom surface? I like to test this by taking the saddle to the dusty band saw table and dragging it across to see if the dust goes with it, checking for a square bottom in a hillbilly way.

Here are a couple tricks we use for these:
1) After you drill the hole for the element to come into the slot, take a small round file and round over the inside edge. This eases the element over instead of trying to bend it at a true right angle. It also removes a "bump" in the bend so it lays flat.
2) Sometimes, we still get un-even or muffled tone. To fix it, I sometimes put a piece of plastic shim under the element on 7/8 of the length of the slot, excluding the part where it bends over. Sometimes it helps the element to get a nice tight contact.

It is really important that the saddle is pushing down on the element in a uniform and stable way, otherwise the tone is shot. These two ideas serve to tweak how the element lays so it makes good contact

I was shown some time ago by a repair guy of 40 some years experience a trick with under saddle transducers that just didn't seem to be even enough through the string set. I know that it's not your issue, but it might help someone some day.

He recommended using a piece of 0.6mm rosewood veneer and putting a thin smear of super glue (CA) on the bottom of the bone saddle, then pressing that onto the veneer and letting dry. Then trim off the excess veneer so what you essentially had was a rosewood shim on the bottom of the saddle. This had just the slightest bit of compression to conform to perhaps a saddle slot or pickup that wasn't just so.

I've used it on a few occasions where nothing else seemed to work, and it did the trick. So the old fella did know a thing or two.

Excellent! I will try all of these ideas. Thank you.

Chris_H said:

If one is skilled at soldering and wiring details, can the wire be shortened? Or is there a capacitance issue?

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Do not cut the wire, there is a good chance you will ruin it.

Rick Turner said:

...it's about force event vectors.

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:agree: Yeah, what Rick said! Everybody knows that... :worship:

hoosierhiver said:

Do not cut the wire, there is a good chance you will ruin it.

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I hand build shielded phono cables with 7 strand 33AWG teflon coated .99999 silver wire, ( like 7 strands of human hair) and have a Metcal soldering station, not the standard weller.(yes, there is a big difference) I can do very clean work with those materials. (not easy diy stuff) Is the lead in a pickup cable more challenging to work with than that? . My Grandpa started teaching me about electronics and HAM radio when I was about 10 years old.



Thank you for the warning hoosierhiver. I will look first, and proceed with caution if I try. I may just opt for coiling the excess and securing with a zip tie. Coax cable, special braids, things that look highly specialized, I dont mess there unless it is broken. I have a nice selection of wires, braids, and heat shrinks at my turntable bench. I am installing a pickup in an upcoming uke, if I do surgery to the cable, I will post pics and report back.

Chris, it can more difficult to work the pickups as you cannot get heat near the piezo film or you destroy it. Each pickup has it's own termination oddities, and often we'll work with conductive adhesive copper foil to make electrode connections.

If you're dealing with piezo ceramics, you have to use SN 62 (2% silver) solder or the lead will leach off the silver plating on the piezo blocks. Etc., etc., etc...

BTW, I regularly work with 44 ga. magnet wire in magnetic pickup making, and I've hand wound with 46. That 33 gauge stuff is huge! I typically wind 8,500 turns of wire on mag pickups...that winds up being close to 4,000 feet of wire per coil. Yes, a guitar pickup can have more than a mile of wire in it...

And I use SN62 for all electronic soldering; it's stronger, it's eutectic so it works nicely, and it may sound better. Yeah...I know...

One more thing; piezo materials have a Curie temperature which, if reached, destroys the piezo activity. That can be below the melting temperature for the piezo film and polymer pickups.

Thank you for the additional bits. I have never even seen one of these pickups with my own eyes, yet, except for the piezo undersaddle that Pete showed me, and gave me one of. I am researching this all now... When I have one in my hands, it will be more clear. If it is not pretty straightforward, I will not mess with it. Maybe it is possible to shorten the lead, not at the pickup end?

At this point, I am still wondering if, in a new build that is slated for a pickup, if part of the install is done prior to closing the box? or if it is all done after? Total newbie here, in over my head but taking it all in. This has been an excellent thread, I greatly appreciate the info that has been shared here. Perfect timing.

The 44 and 46 AWG is frightening to me... maybe someday... That stuff is hard to see, even! I think that is similar to what the coils on a moving coil cartridge are wound with, the nice ones are hand wound.

I use Cardas quad eutectic solder, I think it is somewhere areound 2% silver, I will check. I also use WBT solder, which is similar. As for it sounding better, I have learned to stop doubting stuff like that, even though some of it is obvious fluff. Good solder used minimally in a high quality joint means potentially less of an 'eddy' for electron flow. One bad connection can definitely degrade a signal, even just light tarnishing on the surface of a wire. Speaker drivers break in, they usually sound terrible for the first 4 hours or so, and mostly fully open at 150-400 hours, cables burn in, yes it is audible, cartridges burn in, and I have no doubt at all that instruments 'burn in' too, the molecular structure of the wood adjusting and aligning to the patterns of energy flow that are present when being played. My first uke has been strung now for about 5 days, and I swear the highs are sweeter now than they were when it was first strung.


I see that the MiSi pickup seems to be one of the higher quality options. Any thoughts on other pickups? I see one from Germany, the Shadow pickup, is it any good? Is this a case of personal preference? or learning to work with one particular pickup, finding a recipe that works? Why the MiSi?

I also use the Cardas solder...for all the reasons you already know!

I met George many years ago, and he really helped me to understand some of the sonic results I was getting winding low impedance mag pickups with 7 X 44 Litz wire. I was hearing not only the expected high frequency extension (and I've been making low-Z mags since the late 1960s...), but also much better defined low end.

Yes, the MiSi pickup lead wire can be shortened at the preamp end, no problem. But I'd stay clear of the pickup end unless you don't mind wasting a few in your voyage of discovery.

I use my own D-TAR Timberline pickups. It's an expensive option, but I've not heard better, and that's not just because I did design work on it. I power the preamp with an external battery box connected to the uke with a stereo cable...power up on the ring, signal down on the tip. The battery box has a mono output jack. The down side is that it costs more than most people on the forum spend on their ukes...

I don't really understand the price ceiling with pickups. Nobody blinks at $5,000.00 microphones, but talk about a pickup system in the $350.00 range (installed) and folks go apopleptic. You should have seen the storm of outrage when my pals at Seymour Duncan came out with silver wire wound humbuckers with exotic compound polepieces and the things then cryogenically treated! $1,200.00 a matched pair. I thought it was great. Quality costs, whether it's a fine uke or an amplification system.