Tonefiend Forum

Hi Larry — thanks, BTW, for all your cool posts.

Well, that's the first I've heard of anyone saying that a piezo bridge sounded the same as the magnetic bridge pickup! Are you sure it's working? If you're like most players, you'll notice a huge difference, as in "the mag pickup sounds great, and the piezo sucks!"

Just kidding — but the piezo is a pretty frustrating sound for a lot of players. As you've discovered, it sounds nothing like acoustic guitar, but it has shares some properties with acoustic — specifically explosive transients and vastly greater frequency range than a mag pickup. My impression is that happy pieze users fall into two categories: musicians who just want the convenience of plugging and playing, and don't obsess on the, um, distinctive tonal qualities, and those who combine the piezo sound with non-piezo tone to add a touch of snap and sparkle to the primary magnetic tone.

Quote from joe on August 30, 2012, 09:36
Hi Larry — thanks, BTW, for all your cool posts.

Well, that's the first I've heard of anyone saying that a piezo bridge sounded the same as the magnetic bridge pickup! Are you sure it's working? If you're like most players, you'll notice a huge difference, as in "the mag pickup sounds great, and the piezo sucks!"

Just kidding — but the piezo is a pretty frustrating sound for a lot of players. As you've discovered, it sounds nothing like acoustic guitar, but it has shares some properties with acoustic — specifically explosive transients and vastly greater frequency range than a mag pickup. My impression is that happy pieze users fall into two categories: musicians who just want the convenience of plugging and playing, and don't obsess on the, um, distinctive tonal qualities, and those who combine the piezo sound with non-piezo tone to add a touch of snap and sparkle to the primary magnetic tone.

I'm probably overdoing it by saying it sounds exactly like the Tele bridge clone on the Parker. It might have more usefulness in a stereo mode, where I could simply tap it off to a different effects chain. One of my favorite guitar sounds EVER is Frank Zappa's acoustic guitar solo on the studio recording of "Stinkfoot" - a Barcus-Berry (piezo) goes on one side, and a magnetic pickup going through an envelope-follower filter (Mu-tron?) is on the other side. OH my freaking gawd. Not to mention Frank's playing is just spine tingling.

If you've never heard it, go directly to 2:20 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9FBQ1O5F8k

Another comment about the P-36 - it generates crispy-crunchy sounds that are the result of my strumming hand finger dragging over the pickguard. It did this even with the piezo turned off. I finally concluded it was static electricity creating some sort of arc(k)y - sparky discharge into the circuitry. I removed the pickguard (which was bulged up in the middle anyway) and it totally went away.

Actually, my most compelling reason to want a solid body "thing" that could record a halfway plausible acoustic sound is that my back room/recording area is directly across the wall from my boys' bedroom, and the time when I would be most likely to want to record something is when they have just gone to bed. I have checked out the Variax guitars and that doesn't exactly float my boat either.

There are a few YouTube videos showing people demonstrating the Parkers, and inevitably, when someone flips on the piezo, they wax poetic about the "acoustic" sound. I am guessing these people don't normally play acoustics otherwise they would not say that. <sigh>

Oh, and I should add, if you want to stick with piezos, then you definitely need to run them through a preamp/buffer of some sort. You'll need to check what kind of output you're getting from them to see exactly what would work best, but there are a lot of diy schematics floating around. You might try something simple such as the following just to see if it cleans it up at all. https://www.scotthelmke.com/Mint-box-buffer.html

My understanding is that Takamine typically builds with thicker tops and stiffer bracing, at least for their A/E models, in order to damp and shift sympathetic vibrations. Thin bodied A/E's basically limit boomy resonances by reducing available bass. Alternately, you can do all sorts of heavy-handed eq after the pickup to notch feedback and troublesome frequencies feeding back, but chances are that you aren't getting a natural sound that way, either. Lots of folks just give up on ideas of purity, like David Lindley running Sunrise mag pickups into Jazz Chorus amps, which does sound pretty killer, admittedly.