![]() ![]() This is good because I love the look of this guitar and would sooner die than entertain ideas of cosmetic modification.Īs I continued to read up on piezoelectrics, I stumbled across a bizarre thread of reviews on Harmony Central: hundreds of people were rating the "RadioShack Piezoelectric Buzzer". I spent all day coveting the new LR Baggs X-Bridge, which luckily for me comes in a non-trem version, almost identical to the stock hardtail on my guitar. What kind of sounds could a piezo elicit from my guitar? My new guitar has a semi-hollo design and resonates quite well, so well in fact i have to refrain from strumming it after my wife goes to bed. I had no idea they could be used to achieve "acoustic-ish" analog tones. I had read some vague explanations of what a piezoelectric pickup does, but only understood the digital implications with high-end guitars. It was the first time anyone had ever explained the concept to him, and he in turn told me. Today my buddy John comes home from work at the guitar store all psyched because he just heard some guy's les paul with a fancy piezo bridge installed in it. I have a few issues that I am in the process of remedying: I have new 500k pots on order from the local shop, and one is a push/pull to give me the future option of getting at that single-coil sound. Thankfully, modern acoustic preamps feature equalization filters specifically designed to dial out these harsh textures.I just got a 72 thinline reissue and I am in love. If there’s a downside to piezo it’s that they add nasal overtones to the amplified signal. Today, many guitar manufacturers offer their own piezo-equipped acoustic or solidbody guitars, and many retro-fit pickups are available as well. It proved so popular that Ovation became synonymous with the term electric-acoustic. The result was an under-the-saddle pickup with pure tone and exceptional balance. When their star endorsee, Glen Campbell, became tempted by the Baldwin system, Ovation’s R&D team worked overtime to produce a better unit. But its potential didn’t go unnoticed by modern acoustic guitar pioneers Ovation. The pickup-essentially a thin strip of piezos that could be sandwiched under the guitar’s saddle-suffered from uneven string-to-string balance, and it was exclusive to Baldwin’s guitars. In 1968, Baldwin produced the first under-the-saddle transducer, which could reproduce the vibrations of both the guitar’s top and its strings. However, they replicate only the vibrations of the soundboard, not of the strings. These soundboard transducers are still made today by a number of companies and offer a simple, no-modification solution to amplifying acoustics. The most successful original version was produced by DeArmond, but in the late Sixties Barcus-Berry introduced an improved design that fit inside the guitar, under the bridge. The first piezo pickup format was the contact transducer, a small encapsulated device that could be temporarily attached to the soundboard. ![]() Add a couple of wires and an amplifier, they figured, and-in theory, at least-you should hear something pretty close to the instrument’s true tone. Piezo Electric pickups employ a crystal that has the unusual ability to transform mechanical energy into electrical voltage.ĭuring the Sixties, pickup manufactures realized that if a small piezo-electric crystal could be attached to the soundboard of a guitar, the vibrations from the guitar would produce pressure upon the crystal and create a series of corresponding electric pulses. ![]()
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