Piezo Bridge with passive electronics...?

[billoetjen]

Hi Folks,
I'm waiting for a certain discount retailer to get in some *new* fretless 4 string J clones. Already, I'm planning how I'll upgrade pups, then bridge, then neck, then ultimately, the body, if this savage butchery goe far enough.
I keep hearing some pro's swear by the performance and dependability of good piezo pups. So, I'm wondering if I can go from the piezo bridge passively to my amp head. All I've ever seen so far are piezo to on-board active pre. What's the story on this? I "get it" that I can't mix piezo and magnetic together passively because of the different impedences. What if I routed the two different outputs to separate jacks?

Thanks,

Bill O

[paintandsk8]

Piezo systems almost always have active preamps because piezos need to drive a high input impedance to sound their best. Passive circuits generally just can't provide a high enough input impedance. You could certainly wire your piezos to a different jack, but a more streamlined solution would just be to add a pickup select switch.

Your still going to be relying on the input impedance of your amp which may not be well suited for piezo's. Those things aren't going to drive a cable of any length without significant loss either. In the end your best bet is to go active with piezos.

[Mushroo]

It is definitely possible to run a piezo pickup straight to the amp without an active preamp. I have done it before. I soon thereafter added an active preamp to that bass and I thought it sounded a lot better than it did passive, but that's just my opinion.