Hey everyone,
about 4 years ago I found a video on YouTube about a diy pickup for xylophones (Xylophone Key Mounting Concept - Aluminum Keys, WIP (Glockenspiel) - YouTube). Since then I want to build an instrument, that gets played like a piano, but instead of the strings there are the xylophone plates, that are amplified through the pick up seen in the video.
Unfortunately I do not have any knowledge about electronics, that’s the reason why I never started this project and why I really need some help :D.
In the video you can see, that a magnet is taped on a xylophone plate. A coil picks up the magnetic vibration and transforms it into sound. Can someone explain me, how I would have to set it up, so I can transform the magnetic frequencies to audio frequencies? I know that you need an amplifier for that but i don’t even know how you would connect that to the end of the crocodile clips and what else I need to do so I can, at the end, plug in my headphones to hear the sound.
It would be so amazing if anyone could help me.
Thank you very much.
Isn’t this about the same thing as a guitar pickup? I don’t know anything about magnetic guitar pickups really, but it’s certainly well known technology. There’s this
a synth module that is a guitar pickup with amplifier. It’s basically this:
the bottom half of which is a distortion circuit you probably don’t care about, so all it is is a 1M (not 1m!!!) resistor to ground followed by two simple amplifier stages. This is intended for synth level outputs, to go into a sound system you wouldn’t need as much gain.
In the repo there’s an article by Hugh Davies, “Making and performing simple electroacoustic instruments” which looks like it might be worth studying.
You should have a look at how Rhodes pianos work, it’s very similar except they use tines instead of bars. There are lots of schematics etc. available for them.
The description kinda reminds me of an electric celesta.
Btw, xylophones have wooden bars, glockenspiels are the ones with metal bars.
Thank you very much, thats very interesting. I will definitly have a look on the article
Oh yes, thats right. unfortunately i don’t know how to read the schematics yet, but i’ll try to learn it
Oh wow i didn’t know about a celesta, looks and sounds amazing.
i always confuse xylophones and glockenspiel
I also just found this video: Weekend Project: Sample Weird Sounds from Electromagnetic Fields - YouTube
I think that the technology is basically the same.