A quick page on the benefits of running your contact mics into preamps, specifically the kind below. There’s a lot of snobbery around about getting the ‘perfect sound’ out of your piezos which I don’t necessarily proscribe to, but what is useful is being able to give the input signal a bit of a boost, particularly if you’re running into pedals. There are plenty of pretty cheap pedals you can do this with, but these little HEQ-3 units are very cheap and with a little bit of rewiring can be set up for wired power and a piezo disc if you don’t want to use the bridge pickup they come with. Very convenient shape for fitting into stuff (this is currently just wedged into a test pedal) and mounting screw points make them easy to attach.