Hello everyone,
This is my first post and I'm hoping that I can get some help from people familiar with the Little Gem amplifier, or pickups in general.
I built my Little Gem amp to spec with no problems, and I found an old computer speaker to use. It is a 3.5" (8.75 cm) in diameter, 4 ohm, and 8 W. I also wanted to make a pickup for my acoustic to use with the amp, so I bought a 1.5" (5 cm) piezo buzzer. I broke it open and got the piezo transducer out. I setup audio jacks from the piezo to the audio cable as well as the audio cable to the input of the amp with no problems.
Once I plugged everything in and turned the volume up I got a pretty solid sound out of the amp but it was rather noisy for the EAD strings. It's more of a muffled sound and any bass in the chords dies out quickly. It has some reverb if you strum out some chords, as well.
After listening to the sound bites on the runoffgroove website I was a unsatisfied with how my amp sounded. I encased the entire system in a wooden box, would metal be better for getting rid of the noise fields or am I thinking too hard?
Another weird thing that I noticed that when I plugged in my old Squire Strat to test the amp, it didn't really make a sound. I plugged my piezo acoustic pickup into my Fender amp and it was pretty darn clean compared to my amp, so that led me to believe that there is something fishy about my amp.
I was also wondering whether this had to do with my speaker not being able to keep up.
Thanks a bunch,
JP