"Mas" Maastricht

Here's your neighborhood... couldn't pinpoint the exact number, but I did find Welsdaal street:


And this must be the university:

Erin's Article at Children's Hospital

Hey - check out this article about/by my beautiful wife and son, hot off the presses at Children's Hospital!

Maastricht by air

Here ya go, Kimmy! This is the view looking north along the Maas river (via Google Earth) - I think it captures most of the city. But of course I can zoom in a lot more to any places you want - just point them out and I'll post!
ps - you should be able to click on the image to enlarge it for better resolution.

First quasi-luthierie adventure!

Hello again! One of these days I will start building my own acoustic guitar from scratch, and I plan to post a log of the process here. It's something I've been thinking about, reading about, planning, preparing, etc for a while now, but just haven't yet pulled it together to get started.

So until I get underway with real luthier work (guitar making) I'll just post a related little project that I completed recently: installing a new pickup system into my Martin acoustic guitar.

First of all, here's the guitar, all ready to work on (strings removed).
I was pretty apprehensive to do this, because this is the nicest guitar I have ever owned, I just got it a couple of months ago, and I love it! So even though what follows is a relatively simple procedure, it does involve some permanent modifications, with the possibility of negatively altering the sound of the guitar. Yikes!



So what I set out to do was install a Fishman Ellipse Blend pickup system. One part of this system is a piezoelectric transducer that goes underneath the saddle (the thin whitish piece on the bridge that the strings go over before getting pinned through the guitar top). This is made of a crystal material that converts the vibrations of the guitar into an electrical signal. First step: remove the saddle from the bridge and sand the bottom of it just enough to reduce the thickness by the exact thickness of the transducer. The transducer is the red piece laying on top of the saddle in this picture.





Here's the piezo pickup in the saddle slot, the wire goes through a little hole I drilled in the bottom of the slot. You can see the other end of the wire coming out through the soundhole, so I can attach it to the rest of the electronics outside of the guitar:

I then removed the endpin (the little knob that the strap attaches to) and used a special tool to ream out the hole to exactly the right size for the endpin jack:













The endpin jack is what the cord to the amplifier or PA system plugs into. The jack has to be installed from the inside of the guitar, down through the newly reamed hole. My arms don't fit comfortably that far down into the guitar, so I first threaded a cable through, snapped it into the jack, and pulled the whole thing back through the hole. Here's the cable coming out through the soundhole and plugged into the jack (which is then connected to the preamp circuit board):













Once the jack and pickup were in place, it was just a matter of sticking the semi-circular preamp/control unit to the underside of the top. The volume and blend controls are conveniently located just inside the soundhole. You can also see the little condenser microphone on a gooseneck floating in the middle of the soundhole:




And that was pretty much it! All in all, I am very happy with the results, and was pleasantly surprised with how smoothly and easily the installation went. Maybe someday I'll actually record something with it and figure out a way to post a sound clip somewhere...