I thought i’d start this blog straight in with some info about how i mounted my lace sensor bronze acoustic magnetic soundhole pickup in my Stephen Owsley Smith bouzouki.
The problem with off the shelf soundhole pickups is that they mount on the soundboard, damping it, and secondarily that they block too much of the soundhole. For some time I have been mounting them in other ways, this is the latest. Firstly I mounted a RCA socket on the transverse brace that runs under the end of the fretboard like this:
this is wired up to the endpin jack.
Then I removed all the excess material from the pickup, including cutting off its plastic casing to make it as small as possible. I epoxied a piece of aluminium to the RCA plug, and attached the pickup to that with stickyfoam pads and a wood spacer to get it to the correct height…
and here it is installed:
the advantages of this system are;
* the pickup is easily removable it simply unplugs and the physical mounting and the electrical connection are achieved with the same object
* minimum soundhole blockage when installed and none when not installed
* only one small hole drilled in the instrument
* mounted on a part of the instrument that is not critical to the sound
There will be a piece of ebony veneer fitted on top of the pickup, to make it less obvious, it is a little steampunk as it is.
UPDATE:here is a pic of the pickup mounted with its ebony cover so it is less noticeable.
Similar setup on a Davy Stuart Zouk
Also I thought I’d add pics of the similar but different mounting system i have for the same sort of pickup on my Davy Stuart zouk. In this case the pickup was left in its plastic cover, and mounted in the traditional electric guitar manner with 2 screws onto a shelf made of a piece of angle aluminium that is bolted in using one of the bolts that secures the bolt on neck.
This was possible in the Stuart because it has a larger soundhole, so partially blocking it was less of an issue, is more heavily constructed so i was less concerned about weight, and has a bolt-on neck so the neck bolt was a ready made place to attach things.
