I knew from the beginning that this piano would not have great acousting qualities. My take on the instrument consists essentially of a giant upright electric guitar with keys, so it is not surprising that it pretty much sounds like that: thin, metallic and soft. Luckily, the electric guitar metaphor already provides the perfect solution to this body-less sound: pickups.

The guitar world has been using amplifying pickups of varying types for little under a century now, so there is a vast amount of knowledge to build on. Most electric guitars use magnetic pickups, where permanent magnets are wrapped in several thousand turns of enameled copper wire. The amount, layout and shape of the magnets varies per pickup type, but the basic principle remains the same.

IMAGE OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF GUITAR PICKUP

After studying pickups for a while it became clear that I’d have to experiment with a few pickup candidates for this piano. On this page you can find a description of those experiments, as well as plans for any future pickup setups I’d like to try out.

Individual Pickups:

The original idea was to make individual pickups for each string, similar to the amplification found in a Fender Rhodes electric piano. My first few 3D-printed single-magnet pickups worked to an extend, but proved very fragile. This was no doubt due to my inexperience with winding pickups, but given the motto of this piano as an “IKEA-instrument” I was really searching for an option that was as plug-and-play as possible (within reasonale budgetary and audio-qualitative bounds), and this option was proving to be a little too proprietary and labor-intensive.

3D printed single magnet pickup

Off-the-shelf guitar pickups:

A quick browse of any guitar forum gives one a good sense of the vast amount of knowledge built up surrounding different types of pickups over the past decades. You could even argue there are small wars being waged on these digital battlegrounds, with members making the case for the sound quality of one type of pickup over the other. Some of the most common pickup types are single coils and humbucker, with a single row of 6 and a double row of 12 magnets respectively. The single coil is simple but can be prone to noise, where the humbucker essentially stacks two single coils (with reverse polarity) on top of each other, cancelling out the “hum”. The easiest pickup solution for this piano would be to find a cheap guitar pickup and figure out a way to mount ~10 of those side by side.

YOYO Single coil guitar pickup Humbucker guitar pickup image

These pickups can be cheaply obtained from overseas vendors, so sticking a dozen of these next to each other seems like a nice way to standardise this part of the piano. It also allows users to modify the pickups on their pianos to their hearts content, and a standardised way of attaching the pickups to the piano would even make it possible to swap a bar of e.g. single coil pickups out for a bar of humbuckers. However, when looking at the pictures above, you might have already noticed a few issues. First, many guitar pickups have the magnets placed at different heights. These positions are specifically tuned for the 6 different types of strings: The varying thicknesses of the strings generate different amounts of energy when they vibrate, so adjusting the heights of the pole pieces helps manufacturers to fine-tune the tone of the pickup.

Frustratingly, in my piano all strings are sitting on the same height, so I actually need a less “advanced” pickup that has all magnets perfectly aligned. Unfortunately, even most pickups found on Chinese website have caught up to this design feature. I could always have some pickups custom made with aligned magnets, but that would again defeat the purpose of using stock pickup.

Rail pickup:

One solution might be to use “rail” pickups. Instead of using an individual magnet for every string, these pickups use continuous bar magnets, thus allowing for any string spacing. They come in both single coil or humbucking configurations.

Custom pickups:

There was a time during this project where I was convinced I wanted to make all the pickups for this piano by hand. The mixed feelings resulting from following 3 months of experimentation made me reconsider the viability of aftermarket pickups.

On the one hand, I was pleasantly surprised to see that these pickups sound somewhat good. For the single coils pictured below, I’m using 18mm alnico 5 magnets in a 3D printed bobbin, an unknown amount of turns with 42 AWG Poly-Nylon copper wire, wound using a electric drill.

On the other hand, this attempt was another one of many realisations that I would either need 4 lifetimes of experience in the fields of luthiery, acoustics and electrical engineering to finish this project with the quality I envisioned, or I seriously need to start collaborating with experts, because man do I feel like I’m winging this stuff. The first 3 pickups I made broke after a day or two of very light handling, leading me to treat my last 2 single coils as if they were made of butterfly wings.