With the holiday break period quickly approaching, there is a fantastic prospect that some properly-which means pal or relative could possibly acquire a toy musical instrument for your youngsters, safe and sound in the knowledge that they’ll in no way have to pay attention to the effects! The sound from these inexpensive toy guitars is rather terrible, partly for the reason that they are just far too smaller to tune to a satisfying guitar tuning, so [joekutz] decided to see if just one could be turned into an electrical ukulele instead.
The very first modification on the list was to cut down the string depend from six to four, by notching out new positions on the nut and drilling the corresponding fixings on the bridge. 1 benefit of these affordable instruments is that it’s a lot less of a risk to choose applications to the bodywork!
Next the conversion and re-tuning to make it into a ukulele, the following move was to engineer some pickups. [joekutz] had a pair of children’s headphones in his elements bin and, together with some 3D printed components, wooden dowels, paper cones and glue, managed to mount them inside the system to evaluate the differential vibrations among the front and rear faces of the instrument.
The output signal is about 80mV peak-to-peak, which is huge more than enough to hook up to a typical guitar amplifier and deliver a pleasurable acoustic sound… but who wishes nice with an electric powered instrument? For full grunge distortion, a UTC2025H stereo pre-amplifier was extra to the ukulele as a crude overdrive selection.
Lastly, to lower some of the screechiest overtones, the uke was down-tuned and the conversion was total.
We imagine that this would be an outstanding way to introduce your youngsters to components hacking more than the Winter season crack, and reveal some of the rules of audio-building along the way. Who appreciates, maybe they’ll be asking you to assist them make a true electric guitar from an antique hearth subsequent yr?
