The bass ukulele now has a pickup. I drilled a hole in the back to install it.

The hole was just big enough to get my hand inside the case. I installed a SilenceBan pickup with 3 piezo transducers from EBay. It seems to work fine and is certainly loud – no preamp required.

I had to play around with the transducer location a bit. Moving the transducers away from the bridge towards the ‘f’ holes produces a nice woody sound but makes the system extremely sensitive to feedback. I ended up with the transducers close to the feet of the bridge.

Does it work? Overall yes. A double bass / bass guitar / bass ukulele is low and this needs decent speakers. I tried it with a guitar practice amp and it sounds pretty horrible. Best sound is via the hifi into DIY Kapelmeister speakers – sounds rather nice 🙂 There can be rather a lot of sound from fingers hitting the string and of course feedback is always a risk.