I’m feeling all handy-dude today after I installed a piezo pickup in my Washburn oval hole mandolin. I already have a pickup in my Loar F-style mando, but I wanted one in the Washburn because I only play mando on a few songs at gigs and the much cheaper Washburn makes more sense as a gigging-out instrument in that context. I also like the oval hole tone for the music I play — rootsy stuff — and I suspect that when/if I eventually upgrade, I’ll get a nice oval hole mandolin unless I get into bluegrass.

First, some choices to make: I rejected any external pickup system because I don’t like the way they look, with a wire running across the top of the soundboard to a bolted-on jack. I decided instead to go for an internal system that ran through an endpin jack, making it basically invisible. My Loar uses this setup and the only giveaway is the large strap button on the bottom of the mandolin, which has a hole in the center where the jack is located.

It’s a neat and functional installation — but it also requires drilling right through the bottom of the mandolin and the end block that is located on the inside of the instrument. That’s not for everyone, but it’s also not rocket science.

I looked around for piezo pickups and there were a lot of choices. I could go with eBay specials from China that ran less than $25, but I was concerned about quality. K&K pickups have a lot of fans and a great reputation, but the internal system also runs $90. Ninety bucks for two crystal pickups and a jack seemed absurd to me (I’d peg the parts cost at 25 bucks even for really high-quality piezo pickups), especially given that this was almost two-thirds the cost of the actual mandolin.

Instead, after a little poking around on The Google, I settled on a JJB Electronics dual-pickup system for $40. It had really good user reviews, a much more rational price tag and is American-made. But unless I wanted to hand $100 to a tech (again: the mando only cost me $150), I’d have to do the installation myself. (I didn’t take any pictures of what follows — I wish I had — but this description should work well enough if you’re considering a similar installation in your mandolin or acoustic guitar).

Installation requires drilling a half-inch hole through the end of the mandolin and — in my case — enlarging the strap button hole in the tailpiece so it also was half an inch across. It also requires snaking the jack from the inside of the mandolin through that hole, and then gluing the two connected piezo pickups to the underside of the mandolin top. All of this is far easier to do with an oval hole mandolin than an F-hole-style mandolin. All I had to do was reach into the hole and hold the pickups in place after I got the strings out of the way.

The pickup appeared to be well-made of quality parts. I downloaded the instructions, watched a few YouTube videos of similar installations and went to work.

First came the hole. I removed the strap button on the bottom of the mandolin, which conveniently left a nice little pilot hole in place. I then used a quarter-inch wood bit to drill an initial hole — I decided to drill in stages to help avoid splintering of the wood.

When I swapped in a half-inch wood bit, I realized I’d also have to enlarge the hole in the tailpiece where the strap button had poked through. The tailpiece is made out of metal, and wood bits can’t handle metal work. I didn’t have a half-inch regular drill bit, so I decided to invest in a step bit — a nice purchase that will make some other work easier in the future. That bit allows you to drill a series of step-by-step larger holes from 3/16ths to a half-inch, and it made short and clean work of this task. Once the (thin bit of) metal had been bored out, I followed up with the half-inch wood bit just to make sure I had a nice clean hole.

Next, I needed to snake the jack in place. This is where the research I had done in advance really helped out. I ran a guitar cable through the endpin hole from the outside, then reached into the mandolin and pulled the cable out through the oval soundhole. I plugged the jack into the plug on the end of the guitar cable, then pulled the whole apparatus back through the soundhole and out of the hole I had drilled in the bottom of the mandolin. I had eyballed some adjustments in advance, and just enough of the jack emerged so I could thread on some hardware and then add the endpin cover — which was a bit of luck.

At this point, the two piezo pickups were hanging out of the soundhole, while the jack was bolted in place through the tailpiece. I put a thin layer of Super Glue gel on the flat side of a pickup, carefully put it inside the top under the location of the left side of the bridge, then pushed it up against the underside of the mandolin top and held it for a minute. After I put the second pickup in place on the other side of the bridge, my work was done.

I gave the glue a few minutes to set up completely, plugged in the mandolin to a powered monitor speaker and tried it out. The tone was superior to the crappier single-piezo setup of my F-style mandolin, with significantly more output. It was great! And the endpin jack cover hid a bit of dirty work and made everything look professional and neat. There is one minor issue: The cable from the pickups to the jack is so long that it rattles around around a little bit against the inside of the instrument, but I can cure that by eventually taping the cable against an internal brace.

I’d peg the installation time at a half-hour — if I did this again, I could probably do it in 20 minutes or less. I easily could have spent $200 on a similar-quality pickup and installation, but instead put this together for $40. It was well worth it.