Toy Guitar Becomes Electric Ukulele

JoEtuuube’s daughter’s toy acoustic guitar sounded terrible, so he converted it into a tolerable electric ukulele.

Cameron Coward
3 years agoMusic

Toy instruments for kids usually aren’t instruments at all. They can make noise, but so can rocks in a tin can. For classification as an instrument in my book, it must be tunable. JoEtuuube found out that his daughter’s toy acoustic guitar failed to meet that requirement. It was impossible to tune the lowest strings properly and so it produced cacophony instead of melody. To make it bearable, JoEtuuube converted the toy guitar into an electric ukulele.

Pickups are the components that produce an audio signal for amplifying a guitar and they come in two broad categories: coil pickups for electric guitars and piezoelectric pickups for acoustic guitars. The former contain magnets wrapped in wire, which work like inverted electromagnets. When placed underneath vibrating steel strings, they produce a small electric current corresponding to the frequency of vibration (the pitch). Piezoelectric pickups turn the physical vibration of a guitar’s wooden body into an electric current. JoEtuuube made his own piezoelectric pickups for this project, but first he needed to remedy the tuning problem.

The toy guitar was difficult to tune because the neck (and therefore strings) was too short. It wasn’t possible to tune the lowest strings down enough without making them too slack to play. The solution was to ditch them altogether in favor of a four-string ukulele setup. JoEtuuube carved new grooves in the nut and bridge to rearrange the four strings evenly over the fret board. He tuned those to a high enough pitch to work with the short neck, then set out electrifying the converted ukulele.

JoEtuuube made his own piezoelectric pickups using an old pair of headphones. A microphone is essentially a speaker driver working in reverse. If you vibrate a speaker driver’s cone, it will generate an electric signal. By attaching the headphone speakers directly to the guitar’s body, JoEtuube could pick up the vibrations. That signal can feed into a guitar amplifier, but JoEtuuube went one extra step.

The sound straight from the DIY pickups was clean and JoEtuube wanted something more gritty—he wanted distortion. So he made his own mini overdrive pre-amp box using a cheap stereo amplifier board. The signal loops through that amplifier in two stages to generate distortion and then outputs through a capacitor that filters out the screechy high frequencies. That signal then goes into a standard guitar amplifier.

The result sounds decent considering what JoEtuuube was working with. It won’t impress any musicians, but it is much better sounding than the original toy guitar.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist. Check out my YouTube channel: Serial Hobbyism
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