piezo bridge and roland v-bass

[heavyfunkmachin]

im considering very seriusly getting a roland v-bass, but the GK-3B pick ups looks like an awfull monster, so my question is:

can i use the v-bass with a piezo bridge??
i meand INSTEAD of the gk-3b pickup...

will it be better/worse?
any specific considerations to have?

thanks

[Dave Muscato]

Sure... Carvin, Godin etc make some synth-ready guitars which only have piezo saddles.

http://www.carvin.com/products/guita...ItemNumber=NS1

http://www.godinguitars.com/godingman.htm

Keep in mind that these are 13-pin synth ready, not 5-pin MIDI....



From Godin's website:

"The best MIDI pickup is a piezo-based pickup, one that is built into a set of bridge saddles. Piezo-based pickups track faster, more reliably and require no external modification to an instrument; if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never know your guitar had it. You also get the piezo acoustic tone as a bonus!"

http://www.godinguitars.com/whatismidi.htm

[Dave Muscato]

Here ya go:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/produ...7&src=3SOSWXXA

[elros]

Yes. Systems are available from RMC and from GraphTech.

HOWEVER.

There is another option. The Roland GK-KIT-BG which is the internal version of the GK-3B which is indeed big and nasty looking. I installed this into my Surine bass and as you can see from the photos it doesn't look very bad at all. And it's quite a bit cheaper compared to the piezo systems.
I have the GK-KIT-BG in my two six string basses: the Surine and the Benavente fretless, and the system works quite well both with the V-Bass and the GR-20. I also have a Conklin bass that has the RMC piezo and poly-drive system, and although it has too many strings for the GK system it still seems to work quite well with the V-Bass. But I haven't used that one quite as much as the six-string instruments.

Note that the Roland GK-KIT-BG may not appear on the lists that Roland dealers have - it doesn't here in Norway at least. But it's still available for ordering. Make sure you order the -BG version otherwise you'll get the guitar kit.