Review: PiezoBarrel “Wood” clarinet pickup
I’m a little late to the party here after Chris Mothersole’s recent article in The Clarinet, but I recently acquired a “PiezoBarrel” wind instrument pickup and wanted to share my experience.
The PiezoBarrel pickup is a way to electrify wind instruments, for amplification and for the application of electronic effects, such as guitar effects pedals. There are a few models of PiezoBarrel with different tonal characteristics, and the “Wood” model seems to be optimized for clarinets.
I have experimented with electronics previously using the Little Jake pickup, on bassoon, bass clarinet, and English horn. In those cases installation involved drilling a small hole into a metal bocal or neck, and soldering on a small adapter to accept the Little Jake. I considered pursuing the same approach with the clarinet, but had some apprehensions about drilling into a wooden barrel.
While trying to work up the nerve to proceed, I discovered that the PiezoBarrel is available pre-installed on a clarinet barrel. (It can also be purchased separately if you want to take on the do-it-yourself task or have your repair tech handle it.) I found this to be a surprisingly affordable option, so I placed my order through PiezoBarrel’s eBay store, figuring this would at least be a way to test-drive the pickup before installing on one of my own barrels.
On arrival, I found the provided plastic barrel to work quite well with my instruments, so my wooden barrels get a reprieve for now. If I choose, I can later use the same pickup with many other instruments, if I install adapters (available from PiezoBarrel) for mounting on wood or metal.
The package I purchased included the plastic 65mm barrel, with a screw that can be used to close the hole (so the barrel can be used as a “normal” barrel). It also included the PiezoBarrel pickup unit, which is a cylinder just over 2cm in length and about the same in diameter (or just under 1 inch). It screws into the threaded hole in the barrel. It also includes an audio cable, with a 1/8″ end that plugs into the PiezoBarrel and a 1/4″ end that plugs into your effects or amplification. There were also a few extra adapters, such as for installing into my own wooden barrels, and a small screwdriver for adjusting the PiezoBarrel’s output volume. (This is something you would adjust once if needed, and then adjust volume for performance using your amplification system’s volume controls.)
Installation was as simple as putting the barrel on my clarinet, screwing in the pickup, and plugging in the cable.
The PiezoBarrel doesn’t require an external preamp. It can be plugged directly into a PA system or something like a guitar or keyboard amplifier (using the included cable), or can be routed through effects units of your choice.
Most pickups will impose some amount of “character” on the sound of a wind instrument. (For a more purely “natural” sound, use a high-quality external microphone instead, though this raises potential problems when working with live effects or on noisy stages.) However, I find the PiezoBarrel’s sound to be surprisingly close to natural on my clarinets.
For baseline comparison, here’s me playing, recorded with a conventional microphone:
And here’s what it sounds like through the PiezoBarrel:
Here are some examples using effects, from the Boss GT-1000CORE guitar multieffects unit. All have a little added reverb. For simplicity, they do not have any noise reduction or added EQ/compression, which I might do to sweeten them for a real performance or recording situation.
Overdrive plus chorus:
Delay:
Distortion:
Pitch shifter:
In my opinion, this is an excellent system for electrified clarinet—easy, affordable, and of suitable quality for performance.
I only know of one etude book geared toward woodwind doublers, and it’s Chris Vadala’s Improve Your Doubling: Advanced Studies for Doublers (Dorn Publications, 1991).
