DIY or store-bought simple preamp?
 

I have a 1957 Gibson archtop that plays beautifully and am wanting to amplify it to play on stage.

I have a Dean Markley Artist Transducer piezo pickup that sounds all right plugged into my amp at home but am needing to add a preamp to the pickup to make it plugin-able to stage audio boards. I just need a simple preamp and don't have much money.

I've seen videos and schematics to make my own simple preamp and since I have a long ago electronic background I wouldn't mind doing this.

But I also found these in-guitar preamps on Amazon for less than $20 so I wonder if this is a better way to go than building my own (I'd use my Markley pickup for this prebuilt preamp since it's probably the better pickup):
http://www.amazon.com/Acoustic-Guita...ref=pd_cp_MI_0
or
http://www.amazon.com/Acoustic-Guita.../dp/B008AS054K

I hesitate cutting a hole in my old Gibson so if I buy one of these preamps I'll probably put it in an enclosure box with two female 1/4" jacks that'll run in line going to the board.

Has anyone done this kind of thing? Is this a good idea?

Again, I'm looking for just a simple preamp and have next to no money to spend on this.

Thanks for yer input!
Augie

There's a couple of circuit designs on the Musical Instrument Makers Forum, I'v built a couple of the designs. They are blending preamps for either a piezo and a mag pickup or a piezo and internal mic, and there is a design that fits under the pickguard of an archtop.

Thanks a lot, Rodger. I'll check out that forum and see how those work out. I'm feeling inclined to just spend the few bucks and buy the preamps listed above on Amazon, though. In order to same some time (though my $ is really short).

I like how there are designs on the forum for a variety of instruments. If I only had the time.

Thanks for the great input everybody.

Hi,

For my passive pickups, one day I soldered very easy circuit based on:

http://www.till.com/articles/GuitarPreamp/index.html

Only mods I did are:
- used 2SK117 JFET (much easier to buy),
- changed R1 rezistor to 1M Ohm (reduce some of low freq boominess)
- use 10k pot at output stage to have some volume control.

I was really pleased by its performance - its ulra low noice (thanks to 2SK117) and very transparent.
It does not give any gain, but I found out, that it is better to use i.e. MIC input on mixing console/power mixer, than adding another aplifying stage in between.
I think it because of it's low noise profile and avoiding another op-amp stage in the chain.

Compared to active Samson DI-BOX (S-Direct), it sounds a looot better, and noise-free.
And its so cheap :)
So I ended up with throwing away original PCB from S-Direct and using just box and jacks (elements soldered directly on jack inputs).

Cheers,
Marek.