Lovely presentation and fun project, well done . I find that if you cut and make the piezo really small, about pea size it eliminates a lot of the nasal quality and sounds is much better because it puts the resonant frequency out of human hearing. You may notice the pro units all have tiny pickups. You can cut down with a diamond dremmel wheel. All the best from UK.

when you pulled out that jack i thought you going to crazy town and gonna drill a hole in your violin ... big whew! the robot noises are amazing + nice job Mica.

Wow, good job. That's some really cool custom work.

If you've got a spare ten bucks, 3SigmaAudio sells impulse responses taken from nice violins/violas/cellos w.r.t. (I think piezo) pickups placed on them. I use them with my electric 7-string to imitate different string ensemble sounds and it works great. It turns that really buzzy DI signal into a very convincing sound when run through a room reverb and a hall reverb in parallel (both full wet, with a bit of low-passing on the room so that none of the piezo buzz from the dry sound gets through.) Can't recommend them enough, they really help to get a very "classical" sound without a real hall to record in :D Really cool DIY build, props for having the courage to put a pickup on your acoustic. I'm way too scared to do that with mine :P

Great job, always like the nazally thin piezo pickups. BTW,, those CNC motor sounds, try to sample them next time to make some unusual sound designs

great tutorial

How does the piezo sit on the bridge?

Awesome! Question! How did you attach the pickup to the bridge? I made a cigar box fiddle and am interested in doing this for it. Mainly for fun and noodling around with distortion and other effects. Except, probably won't do the built in pre-amp. I have an external pre-amp I can use.

You mentioned friends from Wales, did you connect up with Del? :D