Piezos, anyone using them? Used as only output?

JanVanHove

JanVanHove

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Someone mentioned piezos and I was thinking:

"Could one use successfully Piezos as the only pickup on a bass?"

Are they reliable enough?
Do they sound good enough?
Do they have strong enough output ?

Gimme your thoughts...
 
I more or less use it exclusively for when I play with my orchestra. The output it several times higher than the magnetic p'up. The tone control lets you get a deep, double bass-ish sound or the clearest, crispiest growl in the world!
And it's reliable, very reliable.

An idea I've been kicking around is to get a Warwick with TCS and just a piezo.
 
JanVanHove said:
Someone mentioned piezos and I was thinking:

"Could one use successfully Piezos as the only pickup on a bass?"

Are they reliable enough?
Do they sound good enough?
Do they have strong enough output ?

Gimme your thoughts...
Click to expand...

They are reliable, but I normally don't use them as the only source for the output. I use them as an add-on to get more clarity and a more defined sound, but still keep the pickups to get the low end for me. Remember tht piezos only capture vibrations where the strings touch them, but having pickups at different spots of the vibration might help you get a fuller sound.
 
Piezos are cool, no doubt. The special system I requested as part of my custom shop bass (the ocean blue Vampyre in the Gallery) has been a godsend for me; it gives me a tonal element that I've been trying to get for years.

But pay heed to Oliver: A Piezo pickup doesn't actually receive and transmit waveforms as SOUND. It receives and transmits the information as VIBRATION. A piezo is based on the same concept as a motion-sensor in an alarm system... the thing you stick on a window to sense when it's opened, shut, or broken. This is why they're so popular in acoustic instruments: they transmit the attack and percussive nuances of the instrument with almost no feedback. The reason for this is it's not a magnet; it's not a microphone -- there's hardly any chance of creating the gain loop that creates feedback through amplifiers with magnetic pickups.

In the special Fishman bridge that Warwick uses to house the piezo system, each string has it's own sensor, and this makes for a fantasticly clean, balanced output. When the tone knob is all the way up, the sound is best described as "crispy" or "papery". There will be a ton of thin-sounding high mids and highs, wicked fret noise, and lots of "string scrape" in the sound. By itself, this can sound pretty nasty. When you turn the tone knob all the way down, there is very little definition to the sound at all, however there is this very solid LOW end underneath that, if your speakers can reproduce it, can be huge. If you leave the tone in the middle, the sound is workable; it sounds pretty much like one of those acoustic bass guitars you see in music stores everywhere; like a Takamine or a Kaman. It sort of sounds like a "poing" with a little bit of "boom" underneath it. :)

So, do I recommend using a Piezo by itself? Not really. The tone I dig happens when the piezo adds an "acoustic" character to an already strong tone. I EQ my bass with the magnetic pickups first, and then gradually bring the Piezo volume up until I hear a little extra "zing", finger noise, and "boom". I have played fretless basses with a similar system, and the resulting tone is UNBELIEVABLE.
 
Cristal clear info from you Seth. Thanks!!

Maybe move this to "Tips n' Tricks"
 
Seth, that is exactly the information I was looking for, and then some! Thanks a lot!

PJ
 
thanks Seth... up until now i was only really guessing what piezos did... now it all makes sense

Cheers

Lex
 
One of the interesting ways of using piezos is switching the "bright" bridge pickup for a piezo bridge and leave the neck magnetic pick up for the meaty lows.

The usual complaint about piezos is that they sound too brittle for many bass players. Of course there are better and worse piezos, but it seems this brittle thing is inherent to piezo sound reproduction.

My project of CS until the custom shop denied me the pleasure of a 6 string BO Infinity :twisted: with piezos, was to modify the pick up placement to get a humbucker under the sweet spot and then the piezos at the bridge. That way I could get a good stand alone magnetic sound, a good mixed sound and I wanted to route the electronics for making piezo only sound possible.

Now I revisited the idea, as it would make a great fretless if Tone Chambered and it would be a great thing to be able to have it in 7 string configuration as my ERB fever is growing more insidious every day.

Currently CS won't change neck joint, won't change neck width and doesn't offer a piezo system for more than 6 strings. Also the electronics routing only gives you independent volume and passive tone for the piezo, while the ideal would be to take both signals through a balancer (Magnetic only, mix 50/50 at center click, piezo only) and then to 2 or 3 way preamp (2 way usually is enough for me anyway).

That would be an interesting project indeed, but I don't think the CS will be changing so many "no way" into "yes of course"any time soon.

If I ever get enough money to pay for it is another important issue :D
 
i did once stumble across a fretless Zon that only had piezo pickups. from what i barely remember, it didn't sound bad
 
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