TP-1 Self-adhesive Piezo Pickup

This is a very good transducer style pickup, and a total steal at this price.I tried this on both a steel string and a nylon string (my main reason of interest in this type of pickup) and I was pleased with it on both. No pickup is going to reproduce the sound of an acoustic instrument, but this hooked up to my amp sounded very pleasant. It's a transducer though, so it does pick up everything from your playing, to your pants rubbing on the body of the guitar. The onboard volume control is a nice touch not seen on a lot of other transducer types. Being able to dial in the the input volume into the amp was very useful. The dial is in a nice spot and easily found with you finger when trying to operate it blindly.The case is plastic and feels solid enough, but obviously it's not made to be abused. Adhesion on this thing is strong. Went on easy and had no trouble staying put on either guitar. You have to give it a little twist to get it off, and there was a very small amount of residue left on the guitar after, but that should be expected with any adhesive. It came right up with guitar polish. The adhesive disc on the back looks like it can be used and reused many times. No idea how many, but they include an extra for when it wears out, i guess, and a separate velcro strip. I'm assuming the velcro is for someone doing a lot of switching from instrument to instrument.The included cable is alright. It's long enough for around the house/studio, and it comes with a good 1/4 to 1/8 inch adapter. I didn't notice any noise from the cable. It's good and useable, but I would want something more robust if I was in a live situation. But that's a personal preference, so I will not dock any points on that.Give it a shot. It's good, small, easy to use, and cheap. It's a useful little tool to have at your disposal.

Disclaimer: I have no prior experience with pickups or instruments that "plug in", so this is going to be from a pretty naive perspective.I used this in conjunction with a Behringer audio interface to hook up my Kala 15S for a live stream on YouTube. After tweaking volume levels here and there, I'm actually really pleased with the sound I'm getting off of it. I'm having fun using it to run little multi-track experiments in Audacity. No idea what it would be like in a concert setting.It falls off if I neglect to give it good push from time to time, but that might be because I used up some of the stickiness during placement.After one of its falls, I experimented with holding it to the back of one of my harmonicas and it sounded pretty good. Demands further investigation.

I have Loctite blue poster putty and so I removed the adhesive backing and balled up the putty and made it very pliable & warm and stuck it onto my nylon string guitar in the end. I also did not use the included cable, but found a much shorter cable and use a cheap 35 dollar wireless guitar transmitter / receiver set and this thing works great with it.I placed it in a few places to find the sweet spot and it works great. Then I tested it on a harp, empty coffee can drum (tiny engineering daughter suggested this) and a thumb piano and it still sounded great. The key is using a tiny amount of putty, spreading it out as thin as possible, and that putty is solid so I believe that the vibrations go through the solid putty right to the transducer microphone better allowing for a solid contact rather then the included foam padded double sided tape. What also helps is figuring out where to place it. Once you find the sweet spot it is amazing how it sounds. I also tested this on my acoustic electric full size cutaway dreadnought with a high end powered pickup system with adjustable eq and to be honest in a blind fold test one could not be able to tell the difference. I'm not the kind of guy to break out a sound amplitude meter and get all scientific on this mic. Being an engineer is my day job, and to me this mic sounds great to my ears.I use the putty as for it doesn't ruin the surface, and it allows me to move the mic and attach it to many different instruments I have at my house, but at this price I believe getting a few more won't hurt.

The packaging was the first red flag. The envelope had a cut, and the "fix" consisted of folding the envelope over the cut and putting some tape on the top. But because that's probably not the seller's fault I didn't think much of it. Now, the actual product's box looked like it was already opened. When I opened the box I was surprised to see this golden adaptor that was not included with the product, which made me believe (with all the other red flags) that this product had been returned by a previous customer. But I can't be certain so the main thing is, the product is NOT working. Simple as that. I connected and attached everything properly and transducer simply won't show signs of life. This is the second transducer I bought on amazon, the first was defective and I tried this one hoping it would work. I'm willing to change this review if my issue is solved but until then, as unfortunate as it is, this deserves one star.

First, no pickup can reproduce the pure and beatiful sound of an acoustic instrument, no matter how expensive the pickup. A pickup adds its own electric coloration and then the amp colors it even more. The only device that can come close to reproducing that beautiful acoustic sound is a good microphone.This pickup is a cheap way of amplifying the sound of your instrument. However, it's a dirty sounding pickup. It picks up everything, the sound of your fingers rubbing against the instrument and even when you touch its cord and the pickup itself. I decided to use a soundhole pickup instead, much cleaner sounding. I used the same guitar, amp, input, and settings.If you do decide to go with this pickup, don't attach the adhesive directly to your instrument or you will have a very hard time removing it. You might even damage your instrument. Place a small piece of masking tape on your instrument, then place the pickup on it.