Hi everyone. For a while now I’ve been wanting to try and electrify my shamisen. Last year I bought a shamisen pickup from Itone, but it ended up getting fried.
Recently I decided to buy a kna UP-2 piezo pickup for acoustic instruments and a ds-1 pedal. I’ve been playing around with them for the past few days, but I’ve ran into a big issue and thats the insane feedback. I can’t turn the volume up much without getting a lot of feedback on the amp.
Normally this wouldn’t be a problem since you can still hear the distortion, but it does become a problem when you can’t hear the shamisen among other instruments in the room, but can’t turn up the volume without instant feedback.
I had this same problem with the last pickup, and the common denominator between the two seems to be the nature of the pickups, that being that both are microphone pickups. The mic picks up all the echo from the dou and amplifies it, which when turned up causes too much feedback. Trying to muffle the dou by stuffing fabric into it also doesn’t help, which means the problem is entirely with the microphone.
Someone suggested maybe putting the pickup inside the dou would help, but then I would have to drill a hole to fit the chord.
If anyone has experience with using pickups on shamisen or putting shamisen through distortion then I would love to know what you guys know about this because I am at a loss on what to do. Thanks!
