![]() This makes piezos a go-to option for players working in high-volume situations. Piezos have a hidden profile that protects the look of your guitar, they offer a full frequency range, and they’re among the best at rejecting feedback. They sense your guitar top’s vibrations and convert them into an electrical signal. The pickup itself is a thin strip of piezoelectric crystals that sit under your guitar’s bridge saddle. Piezo pickups are by far the most popular acoustic guitar pickup out there. Piezo Acoustic Pickups Strengths: Feedback resistant, broad frequency spectrum So we’ll look at all three through the lens of our own acoustic pickup offerings, helping you narrow down the field and find the perfect pickup for your acoustic guitar. Knowing which is suitable for you is all about knowing your application. Some are better at rejecting feedback, while others may sound more natural. The first step to finding the proper acoustic pickup is knowing that the majority of them fall into three categories:Įach of these designs has its strengths and weaknesses. So how do you know which is the best acoustic pickup to buy? You read this post that’s how. And finally, each type of acoustic guitar pickup has a unique sound with its own list of pros and cons. On top of that, you need to consider the rest of your signal chain and how it interacts. There are several different kinds, and each has its technical requirements to get the best performance. A flexible piezo layer surrounds the core conductor and the whole thing has a braided wire sheath along its length.Finding the right acoustic pickup can be difficult. Looking like a traditional electric guitar pickup hook-up cable, this UST uses a coaxial design with the hot conductor at the middle. Imagine a much thinner, more flexible, pickup than the red Fishman UST above. I actually worked on a ribbon-style transducer a couple of weeks ago and forgot to take a photo. If there’s a problem, you might want to clip or secure it inside the guitar. It can resonate with the top’s movement, or the air in the guitar, and cause feedback. The ‘working/active’ part of the pickup can be made longer and, once the slot is full, the unused portion just pokes though the hole in the bottom of the saddle.Īs a side note, be careful of this extra active part inside the guitar. All its internals are flexible and the whole thing can be easily bent (don’t kink it).īecause it’s more flexible, it’s not tied to a particular length of saddle or slot. Pickups like LR Baggs’ Ribbon don’t employ rigid conductors like the Fishman. It needs careful installation in a flat slot with a perfectly flat saddle bottom over it. Oh, and you should definitely be careful of the joint where the cable connects - it can be delicate. It doesn’t bend much (nor should you try bend it). The conductor strips and wrapping give this pickup an amount of rigidity. ![]() It has a piezo strip between two conductor strips (hot and ground) and it’s wrapped in a (grounded) shielding tape to keep any nasty electromagnetic interference (EMI) away from the internals. This is what I refer to as a ‘rigid’ UST. Each operates on essentially the same principal - a piezo ‘strip’ is sandwiched between a hot and ground conductor and is shielded all around in some way - but how they achieve this is slightly different. More possibilities opened up for UST pickup design and, as things have shaken out, we’ve ended up with three main types. Now it was possible to make a single element span the full length of a saddle slot. No more need for housings and individual elements for each string. Through the application of liberal amounts of “science” these boffins were able to make thin, flexible, plastic sheets that were essentially big, flat, piezo elements. Yeah, Science!Īround thirty years ago, men and women with high foreheads, wearing white coats, and carrying clipboards started doing weird things with various plastics. ![]() ![]() Careful positioning is more critical and they may not be ideal if your guitar has an odd string spacing. They work fine but, because there are six discrete elements, they can be fussy about placement - if each element isn’t directly under a string, you can easily have output imbalances from string to string. And this is what some USTs are still like, especially at the budget end of the market. ![]()
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