Ingredients

Ingredients

Core ingredients

  1. A cello
  2. Four Electromagnetic pickups
  3. An amplifier
  4. A speaker and/or transducer

Joiners

  1. Pick up mounts
  2. Wooden collar to mount speakers
  3. Cabling
  4. Cable connectors

Peripherals

  • mixer & pedals
  • soundcard, laptop & SuperCollider

A cello

cello We used one chinese cello and one east german plywood number. They were selected on the basis of having a vaguely decent tone yet being fully butcherable (£100 - £300 GumTree/ eBay)

Electromagnetic pickups

pickups These CycFi-research Nu Series Modular Active Pickups are lovingly made in Singapore. You need one for each string you wish to drive. These are slightly below line level, despite built in pre-amps. Full line level in production and coming soon ($35 each)

Amplifier

amp Sony FM/AM Digital Media Player DSX-A200UI - 4 channel, 50W per channel, 12V ()

Transducer(s)

speaker 50W, 8 ohm Monacor SP-50X - £12-£45 on ebay

Pick-up mounts

pickups 3D printed - design by Halldor Ulfarsson. These allow individual adjustment of distance of each pick up from strings. Very happy to provide .stl files

Wooden collar to mount speaker

collar CNC’d by Halldor Ulfarsson. These were carefully hand-shaped to fit the curvature of the cello backs. This ensures a tight acoustic coupling between speaker and cello. They were further reinforced with plywood rings internally and drilled through to enable speakers to be bolted in incase of replacement (necessary)

Cabling

Initially scavenged from hoarded scrap, graduating to canford multicore, kindly donated by Ben Jackson.

Connectors

mix, remote control car parts, spade terminals, Neutrik 10 pin dins. —