Is Piezo worth it?

[The Lowe Down]

I am starting down the path of completing one of jumbodbassman's Brazillian fretless knockoffs an I am wrestling with the idea of adding a Ghost piezo system. It essentially adds $200 to my build an I am trying to decide if it is worth it. I have never had the chance to play one in person, but I have heard some fretless with that setup and it does sound pretty unique. What are the merits paired with a magnetic setup? Any comments are appreciated.

[Rockingbird]

Well, you can blend the signals with a blend knob, and that can run some pretty gnarly sounds. Also, (don't quite me on this) it might be able to better recreate an upright sound with the right strings.. And if its ever strung with piccolo strings or brighter rounds, you can get a blinding sound from it. Jeff schmidt uses Piezos with his magnetic's on his ICON 6 string. Take a listen, it sounds incredible.

[The Lowe Down]

Thanks for the Jeff Schmidt reference. WOW.

I was planning on using the Bartolini buffer - it comes with a blend - so I know I will have options and I have heard some pretty wicked sounds blending a good magnetic signal with a piezo. Essentially the buffer runs me $90 and the bridge with saddles is roughly $100 more than without which is where I get the $200 from.

There is no doubt you can do some neat stuff with a piezo, especially on the soloing front. I am really trying to gauge the practicality and usefulness of adding them. I suppose that is as lame as justifying the n+1 'th bass in your arsenal, we really only NEED 1 and it only NEEDS 4 strings and a single pickup.

Essentially has anyone added/bought a piezo bass and not been happy with the tonal options? I am just trying to fend off buyer's remorse in case I hate the sound. It isn't as easy to find a piezo setup you can test drive before ordering.

[Marcus Willett]

My passive (yes, passive) Wendler with a piezo and magnetic pickup is one of the best sounding basses I've ever heard.

[MNAirHead]

PM me.. I have a fretted.. you can come by and try it 2nd week of August.

Tim

[The Lowe Down]

Just wanted to thank all of you who gave me input on the topic. I put the Delano SBC4 magnetic pickups and the Hipshot/GraphTech piezos in my fretless this weekend. I am floored at the variety of tones I can get, especially blending the two signals. I bought the Bartolini buffer and with a little tweaking the signals are even. The mwahh is killer through the piezos. No buyers remorse at all. Now we will see how practical in a mix. If all we cared about was the mix we would all just have a 4 string P and lots of spare cash.

[bassbenj]

Originally Posted by The Lowe Down

There is no doubt you can do some neat stuff with a piezo, especially on the soloing front. I am really trying to gauge the practicality and usefulness of adding them. I suppose that is as lame as justifying the n+1 'th bass in your arsenal, we really only NEED 1 and it only NEEDS 4 strings and a single pickup.

Essentially has anyone added/bought a piezo bass and not been happy with the tonal options? I am just trying to fend off buyer's remorse in case I hate the sound. It isn't as easy to find a piezo setup you can test drive before ordering.

Hey, Jaco only needed 1 bass with 4 strings. What "we" need is another matter.

I recommend both a piezo and magnetic. But it's harder to say that if you go magnetic without piezo than the other way round. I have a Carvin semi-hollow body AC50 acoustic 5 string fretless bass. It only has piezo pickups. It is a very interesting bass and I love it. But it would be a MUCH better bass if it had a magnetic pickup to blend in. The tonal range would be much wider in that case and bass much more useful.

Piezo pickups tend to emphasize the highs. They are very percussive (which is very useful). They tend to pickup string noise a lot. And they also pick up the body and wood resonances (important on an acoustic or semi-hollow) very well.

The magnetic pickups do not seem to pickup the string noise as much and tend to sound the same (like a solid body electric bass) regardless of what is going on.

So with both you can lick the platter clean going from a standard bass sound to percussive solos, to upright imitations, to uber bright stuff. So this is why I recommend both piezo and magnetic. But I'm not sure what kind of bass you are talking about and I have no experience with the piezo under each saddle bridge for a solid body bass.

Perhaps someone else can add more.

[The Lowe Down]

It may have been missed, but I pulled the trigger on both last week and was thanking the PMs and feedback i received. I agree with your thoughts for sure. The two technologies together are very interesting, but I do agree with you that a piezo- only sound on a solid body wouldn't be as versatile. The percussive sound of the piezo does some really interesting things especially with slapping. You can get some very interesting detail in finger style too. It doesn't have the bottom I like by itself, but blending in the Delanos I have really is the best of everything.

As for the GraphTech system, they essentially put 4 piezo crystals in their TUSQ material in saddles. These saddles are drop in replacements to standard bridges, in my case a Hipshot A style. You have 4 or 5 or 6 pairs of tiny wires you route under the bridge to your electronics - essentially along side the bridge ground wire. You can run this directly out, you can wire them to a buffer that can mix the signal with a traditional magnetic signal, or they make a midi board so you can pull a midi signal out the bass. I simply went the buffer route, but the midi option may be pretty cool later. I think there are YouTube videos out there on the guitar versions. It seemed the easiest way to add piezos and was maybe an extra hour of work to put it in. They boast the fact that they don't get the traditional clipping/ quack that some systems do and I have to agree. I was working hard to get them to clip/clank doing slap and pop and didnt really hear it. I actually like the sound I get popping with them.

["T"]

Originally Posted by The Lowe Down

If all we cared about was the mix we would all just have a 4 string P and lots of spare cash.

Awsome. lol