For all you Piezo experimenters out there...

[Rockin John]

Hello guys,

I'm fooling with ideas to install piezo to my fretless (I do my experiments on this bass so carving it up a bit's no problem!). Because it's a 6 I've yet to come across a ready made bridge with Piezo fitted. So I'm toying with placing Piezo elements under the bridge - the type of thing many have taken out of buzzers and the like for the purpose.

I'm particularly interested to know how guys have overcome the mounting issues of these things.

I'm also interested to know what steps guys have taken to reduce the effect of acoustic shock noise like bangs and bumps to the bass body, and finger / string noise. As I understand it, these sounds can be very obtrusive, so mounting the Piezo slices using cork, felt and other such things are done.

Wisdom gratefully accepted.

Thanks.

John

[Koeda]

Hey hey,
From my exerience with buzzers - for drum pads they are great. Under the bridge - they do work, however getting balance from the string volume is a tough one. Tried that first on my fretless and quickly removed them. To see a pic of the best results is at this post:
Question about piezo bridge

My advice for a great sounding piezo set up meeting all of your requirements:

Pick up some Ghost saddles and use on your bridge.
Add an onboard piezo preamp. (I am very happy with the Bart MPB2-918 Piezo-Magnetic Pickup Buffer and NTBT 4.5 in my Jazz. Moved the jack plate off of the control plate. Allows use of P, Mag or P/Mag blend)
David

[Angus]

Hipshot and ABM both make ready-to-install piezo-saddled bridges.

You aren't going to overcome shock noises if you want to maintain trueness of the signal. Cork is going to act like a low-pass filter, so you are going to lose a lot of the signal. And you'll still hear noise if you tap the bass. I think a lot of times when it's done it's done to make sure the element is immobile, or sometimes for force distribution (depending on whether it's a film element, cable, etc).

Either way, buy a bridge, mount it, run the leads to a buffer or preamp, and send it to your other preamp or out. Done.

[Rockin John]

Thanks. If I did the disc element thing I'd experiment with 3 large ones or maybe 6 small ones. Parallel them up and feed into a high Z preamp / buffer of some sort. I'd just try it and see!

I've seen the Ghost stuff. It looks superb. But here in UK 6 saddles + the electronics unit costs around £230 (approx $345?). As yet I've not found Hipshot or ABM bridges with Piezo saddles in UK (but I've not looked that hard, I have to say).

Thanks.

John

[walterw]

allparts has some of those bridges, but they're not cheap.

[Angus]

Originally Posted by Rockin John

Thanks. If I did the disc element thing I'd experiment with 3 large ones or maybe 6 small ones. Parallel them up and feed into a high Z preamp / buffer of some sort. I'd just try it and see!

You'll want to put them into a summing board rather than just throwing them in parallel into a single input impedance buffer. Look at the acousticphonic (or whatever) by Graphtech- it's cheap and it has 6 inputs with a single summed low-Z output. They're like $60 or something.

[Koeda]

It is a cheap way to sample the possibilities. Another bene of the ghost saddles is the piezo takes vibe directly from the strings and not the body. Seems a little less sensitive to the body hits etc. Saddles only run $100 here... Here is some pics of basically what I did to add saddles to the stock bridge. -
http://www.manchesterguitartech.co.uk/fenix-piezo.html

I was not satisfied with the under bridge buzzers, but love the saddles by graphtech. If you want to really get into the piezo world - can't recommend the saddles by graphtech enough.
David

Originally Posted by Rockin John

Thanks. If I did the disc element thing I'd experiment with 3 large ones or maybe 6 small ones. Parallel them up and feed into a high Z preamp / buffer of some sort. I'd just try it and see!

I've seen the Ghost stuff. It looks superb. But here in UK 6 saddles + the electronics unit costs around £230 (approx $345?). As yet I've not found Hipshot or ABM bridges with Piezo saddles in UK (but I've not looked that hard, I have to say).

Thanks.

John

[Rockin John]

Thanks guys.

Yes, David, I saw that mod before. In fact it was the thing that introduced me to Ghost in the first place.

It's an enormous shame this gear is so expensive in UK.

Ta.

John

[draftsmann]

I've subscribed to this one.

I have a Hohner 5-string "cricket bat" bass with Steinberger-licenced hardware. Some while ago I bought very cheaply on eBay some tiny piezo transducers. They are actually small enough to fit right inside the Hohner's diecast individual bridge saddles, where they could be secured with a blob of hot-melt or similar. You see where I'm going with this? It's yet another of those "back burner" projects that I'll do something with one of these days.

On the electronic side of things, my thinking is not to install an onboard preamp; but to install a stereo jack socket, with the piezo wired to the ring contact; then make up a stereo jack lead (short - no more than 10 feet) and a small splitter box. I can then run the piezo output through my all-singing-all-dancing outboard Fishman double bass preamp. From there I could either mix the signals using a small mixer or bi-amp.

Adrian

[Angus]

Are you sure you want to be running an ultra-high impedance signal that far? It's much, much higher impedance than a passive pickup. I try to minimize the length inside the control cavity, let out outside it! Onboard preamps are tiny- at least that way you won't lose so much signal loss trying to drive the cable load.

Heck, even a lot of upright piezo setups build a tiny buffer into the output jack.

[Koeda]

Agreed,
Ran a short cable out of a stereo jack from a peizo into a Fishman BII for a while, much much much happier with the tone onboard...
David

[gnasher1993]

If I get a fretless bass, it WILL have a piezo bridge...