What makes Piezo bridge pickups sound so great?
- Thread starter CondeZL
- Start date
Re: What makes Piezo bridge pickups sound so great?
To me, piezos transfer very little of the character of the actual guitar, so the question becomes what do you do with the signal?
Take practically any unpreamped piezo straight into the board and you have one weak sound.
Use that same element, get it into a a high quality onboard preamp add high quality effects and you can get a sound that is as good as a similarly effected miced acoustic (of course a clean micd acoustic will beat a clean peizo unless there's some modeling going on).
In my experience, other than signal chain, the only physical aspect that influences piezo sound is string gauge- put a nice piezo setup and and run light strings and it will be far less convincing than a set of 12s.
To me, piezos transfer very little of the character of the actual guitar, so the question becomes what do you do with the signal?
Take practically any unpreamped piezo straight into the board and you have one weak sound.
Use that same element, get it into a a high quality onboard preamp add high quality effects and you can get a sound that is as good as a similarly effected miced acoustic (of course a clean micd acoustic will beat a clean peizo unless there's some modeling going on).
In my experience, other than signal chain, the only physical aspect that influences piezo sound is string gauge- put a nice piezo setup and and run light strings and it will be far less convincing than a set of 12s.
Re: What makes Piezo bridge pickups sound so great?
I have an RMC piezo in my Brian Moore guitar, and it is supposed to be one of the better sounding ones. You still have to process it a lot to get it to work right (usually compression, a little EQ and certainly some reverb). Piezos *can* sound good, but I don't thing (electric or acoustic) they sound very good without a little bit of work. Certainly they need their own amp or signal path.
I have an RMC piezo in my Brian Moore guitar, and it is supposed to be one of the better sounding ones. You still have to process it a lot to get it to work right (usually compression, a little EQ and certainly some reverb). Piezos *can* sound good, but I don't thing (electric or acoustic) they sound very good without a little bit of work. Certainly they need their own amp or signal path.