Doing Things Wrong

Electronics - Piezo

Projects utilizing piezo pickups and electronics.


This is the biggest of the Audiovoxes, weighing in at a full 12 pounds, with a 36" scale. The neck is a Brazilian Cherry (Jatoba) floorboard over maple, with a straight cutout headstock. There are over 100 marker dots. The body is veneered masonite over solid plywood, with Danelectro-style Tolex binding. There are also strap buttons, this instrument can be played vertically or horizontally.


This one is almost identical in construction to the Danelectro-style - masonite over chambered plywood body, masonite pickguard. The neck is purpleheart over maple, with plastic fret lines. The soundhole merely serves as a pickup mount, and the pickup was just insurance against never getting the intended piezo system to work. Eventually, I did get it to work, the piezo is incorporated in a modified bridge, and sounds great. 30" scale.


This bass is a 21" scale, with a piezo saddle mounted in an adjustable bridge. The soundhole is just for looks. The strings are metal-wound Kalas. The fretboard is cut out of the ugliest piece of wood I ever received. For such a small neck, I managed to cut around most of the ugly, and the result isn't half bad.


Built as a testbed for a number of ideas:


Audiovox 736 Replica Bass
Audiovox Gibson-style Bass
Audiovox Gibson-style Guitar
Audiovox Strat-style Guitar
Audiovox Danelectro-style Bass
Audiovox 12-string Guitar
Audiovox Mandolin
Audiovox Ukulele Bass
Audiovox Fretless Bass
Audiovox Electric Upright Bass
BC Rich "Osprey" Bass
Brownsville Violin Bass
Cowbell Bass
Danelectro Pro-1 Bass
Danelectro "Super-63" Guitar
Danelectro Silvertone 1457 Rescue Guitar
Danelectro Silvertone 1443 Bass
Danelectro Companion Guitar
Danelectro Longhorn Guitar
Danelectro Silvertone U-1 Guitar
Danelectro '67 Hornet Guitar
Fender Jazzmaster Bass 1
Fender Jazzmaster Bass 2
Fender Jazzmaster Bass 3
Fender Stratocaster Bass 1
Fender Stratocaster Bass 2
Fender Stratocaster Micro Bass 1
Fender Stratocaster Micro Bass 2
Fender Stratocaster Fretless Bass
Fender Stratocaster Bass VI
Fender Stratocaster Bass IV
Fender Stratocaster 12-string Guitar
Fender Stratocaster Uke Bass
Fender Telecaster Bass
SX Precision Bass
Gibson Fenderbird Bass 1
Gibson Fenderbird Bass 2
Gibson Reverse Fenderbird Bass
Kubicki Bass
Mosrite Bass
Schwinn Stingray Bass
Rickenbacker 325 Guitar
Rickenbacker 325 Bass 1
Rickenbacker 325 Bass 2
Rickenbacker 325 Bass 3
Rickenbacker 4001 Bass 1
Samick SG450 Guitar
Danelectro Pro-1 Guitar
Danelectro '63 Guitar
Danelectro Silvertone 1457 Guitar
Harmony H617 Bobkat
Danelectro Silvertone 1450 Guitar
Danelectro Silvertone 1472 Amplifier
Harmony Silvertone 1478

For a while now I've been working on the WordPress plugin that does the slideshows. I had re-written the php back-end from NivoSlider, and then I decided to rewrite the front-end. The front-end is driven by jquery, so it was a good opportunity to get familiar with that. It's actually pretty simple.

Over a few months of tinkering, I added several hundred slide transitions, grouped in families to make things manageable. Eventually, I pretty much exhausted all the things you can do by animating css with jquery. So I turned to inline svg image masks. You can do much more with real graphics than just css, but there is one hitch - svg is poorly supported in Chrome and all its derivatives, including Opera, Edge, and Brave. But if you load this page in Firefox or Safari, it will demonstrate what you can do with svg.