Piezo Transducers

[sliding-tom]

Hi fellow pickers: a question to those of you who have and use acoustics with built in piezos: how do you dial in the EQ to make them sound good or: do you have any other tricks up your sleeves? I have a Martin with a "Thinline" piezo and a Gibson with a "Highlander" ( no onboard electronics on both) and haven't got a really good sound out of either yet - any comments welcome. Hey, Dan, you must be pretty experienced in this, doing so many live shows!? :rolleyes:

[bluespckr]

I've got a Martin D-35 with a Gold-Plus system in it. There is a pre-set kind of "preamp", powered by a 9-volt battery, that's part of the system, but there are no settings or any way to dial a setting in from the guitar.

First, I didn't want to muck up the body by carving out holes to put in a control unit, so the Gold-Plus was a good choice. I still plan on playing it mostly unplugged or miced, but still wanted the ability and a means to plug it in, if I needed or wanted to. Again, this was a good option.

I have only plugged it in once -- and that was straight into a regular guitar amp (a Carvin Nomad, which can emphasize the brighter freqs a bit). It wasn't as warm as I'd like it, but I didn't spend much time tweaking it. I have had other acoustic-electrics (with controls on the guitar - Ovations and a DC16GTE Premium Martin) and I found I was able to get a pretty good tone through our PA system or through a church sound system.

What I would recommend (and what I am considering doing) is to get a small acoustic preamp-type thing -- something inexpensive like a Behringer ADI-21 (CLICK HERE (http://gallery.bcentral.com/GID4585736P4621880-Guitar-Amp-Accessories/Effect-Pedals/ADI21-V-Tone-Acoustic-ADI21-Acoustic-Amp-Modeler-Direct-Recording-PreAmp-DI-Box-by-Behringer.aspx) -- which you can use between the guitar and amp/system. I had one of these when I played a Carvin AC-175 and it warmed the tone up a lot. The AC-175 had piezo-based electronics only, and some body controls, but they didn't do too much.

The Behringer is a Direct Box, as well, so you might find it useful in other applications as well. And if it doesn't do the trick, you're not out a lot of $$$$.

There are other systems, and more expensive systems, but if you've got a good foundation in your guitar and just need to tweak it a tad, this isn't a bad way to go.

[Rockabilly69]

Tom,

I not so fond of the piezos, other than highlanders but I think that they have the market on reso amplification. When I use the highlanders I plug them into a Platinum Pro EQ/preamp by Fishman. It's phantom/battery/DCadaptor powered, with a 4 band semiparametric EQ, compression, and notchfiltering. It's built like a tank and can take the abuse of roadwork, I'm sure there are many good preamps but this one has worked for me for over a 2000 gigs. I recently bought another one as a backup unit (years ago, while partying fairly hard, I spilled a white russian into the first one and I had to take it apart and clean everything with alcohol to get all of the drink remnants out of it:## )

But to tell you the truth I really don't think the sound of a guitar is any good under the bridge unless there's a cone directly under it.

Dan