Something New On A Cajon

UPDATE: Please note that my prediction about how the Puq works was incredibly wrong. The information on this page concerning piezos in general, however, is still pretty interesting. A proper review of the Puq will be linked here once it is complete.

The Solomon microphone company very recently revealed a new product they're calling the 'puq'. I believe because it resembles a hockey puck. Either way, being fans of their Made In America way of doing things, I investigated and found that the Puq is designed to be used on the cajon. 

Now this is cool as I, and I'm sure many (perhaps even most) other sound guys struggle with getting something decent out of a cajon. My go-to setup is a Shure Beta 52A in the sound hole and an SM57 pointed at the middle top front. It works fine but I can never seem to get it quite right.

Enter the Puq. Upon looking at it, and based on past experience, it seems to be based on piezoelectric technology. I've yet to see anything the refutes this; it even says in their own product description, "Not a standard microphone, and much more than a cheap, piezo transducer, the PUQ is a full-range, tactile transducer that can help the cajon player reproduce the TRUE sound of their instrument like never before."

So it says it's not a CHEAP piezo...but I'm still led to believe it IS one? 

My belief is further reinforced in that, like a standard piezo, it features a line level output. It certainly could be some other type of transducer, I'm just not entirely sure what without getting it hands-on.

UPDATE: If I had paid more attention to the 'tactile transducer' part of their description, I probably could have figured this out. 

As an aside, the nature of the piezoelectric crystal is such that, when compressed, it produces an according voltage. So it's a contact microphone. Oh and go take apart your Guitar Hero drum set, each drum pad has a piezo. This is how cheaper electric drum kits are made.

So the only natural reaction to a new piezo microphone being released into the wild is to make the weird cable thing above. Just a piezo, which you can get packs of on Amazon, attached to a 1/4" TS cable. The whole point of this experiment, by the way, is for me to get some vague idea of what the Puq would allow me to do if I purchased it. I realize it won't be the same, but it should be in the ballpark...or the parking lot AT the ballpark at least. 

So, I took my new conglomeration, taped it to the soundboard of my acoustic guitar (these apparently make great banjo pickups by the way), and observed the following frequency response. 

I apologize for forgetting to take a proper screenshot but look at that dropoff! At 2 kHz and up there's basically nothing! For some reason, perhaps because of how petite the transducers are, I was expecting, well, the opposite. A high pass instead of a low pass. 

Cool, so the next step was to try it on the target instrument. So, today, we snuck up on the unsuspecting cajon player and taped the piezo cable just under the sound hole; right where the Puq would be. 

We used this to replace the 52A as the "kick" mic but left the 57 on the front. Below are two isolated, raw audio clips. One with the 57 and one with the piezo. Obviously not apples to apples but you should definitely be able to hear the natural low pass on the piezo. Also, this particular cajon player likes to play with a shaker so that's that extra sound you'll hear on the 57. Which actually notes an added benefit to switching to contact microphones...the ability to eliminate obnoxious shaker noises from your mix! yay!

Admittedly, the piezo sounds a tad undesirable at first. But, it actually ended up teaching me an extremely valuable lesson. After some thoughtful EQing, we came to a sound we really liked but that sounded nothing like the booming kick and snare sounds we were hoping for. And THAT was the lesson.
I've never gotten a good sound out of the cajon because I've been trying to treat it as a rocking kick and snare rather than a totally unique instrument. Once I accepted that, I started to really enjoy the sounds we were getting out of the piezo and expect to really enjoy the Puq WHEN I get it. And even if you don't want to get a special cajon mic (that we are DEFINITELY gonna try on cello too) but are still not getting great sounds, try changing how you think about the cajon. Don't try to force it to be something it's not but, rather, make it shine for what it is.