I found a cool site that explains all this. They need to be treated differently from what we're used to dealing with if you want decent frequency response. Here's why piezos are such a challenge as sound pickups: they are not voltage generators, like magnetic guitar pickups, they are called charge generators. And I can tell you that Les used some very odd and original techniques to make piezo pickups produce a lifelike recording, like making a pickup for a drum head where the piezo element was mounted inside a little slot-loaded box! Les and John (Berry) released records on their own label, Repeat Records, in the 50's, where every instrument, and I'm talking guitar, banjo, fiddle, flute, sax, you name it, were recorded exclusively with piezo contact pickups. I worked with Les Barcus (half of the Barcus-Berry genius partnership) for a couple of years in the 80's. There are many ways.Īctually, use of piezo pickups is very OLD Skool.
#Piezo pick free#
It is not so hard to make on example: just to mount a similar moving coil like microphone on the guitar resonator, and independently mounting some adequate small (NEO) microphone magnet that voice coil go free in magnet fissure.
I heard that some people made electrodynamic pickups which offer great quality of sound. This looking like the best way, but acoustic pickups are most compact and practical way. But it is not so practical because musicians are not so free to move when playing except if will mount mic on the instrument.
I never heard better way to recording any acoustic instrument than just to apply in front of them some quality kind of microphone like condenser. Probably it is because of rough changes in excited hard piezo crystal. Quantitatively, the piezo coupling of most common. This may seem counter-intuitive at first however, you must remember that the basis for the piezoelectric effect is inter-atomic electric fields, and electric fields are not affected by temperature at all. But in real I can not see that any piezoelectric device in audio applications offer higher quality of sound. All piezo actuators continue to function right on down to zero degrees Kelvin. Artec Etn-3 Pre Amp EQ System With Tuner and Piezo Pickup for Acoustic Guitar. It is probably possible to do many improvements because we can remember how big signal had on example earlier piezo turntable pickups. Kremona Ap-2 Piezo Transducer Pickup With Volume Control.