Members RainsongDR1000 Posted November 8, 2006 Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 Finally something I feel comfortable talking about. If your piezo is passive, even running through a Baggs PADI it will still sound sterile. An active Piezo is almost a most because you want the active preamp (in the strapjack) as close to the pickup as possible. I have a Fishman Aura with custom sound images of my Rainsong and it really does take away the "quack" like they advertise. James Taylor now uses an Aura instead of his Pendulum SP1 which is a $1500 preamp so that's quite a feather in Fishman's cap. D-Tar has come out with a similar modeler called the Mama Bear that has gotten some rave reviews as well and will work with any piezo. I'm surprised the Sunrise hasn't worked well for you. Have you tried a tube preamp with it? Even a SOnus bluetube or ART MP has given me good results with a Sunrise at the open-mic I host.As far as EQ, try cutting the 1khz area a lot (-6db) and see if that helps. Read up on the AUra and Mama Bear. I think that will be the way of the future for acoustic guitar amplification. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members bmusic Posted November 8, 2006 Author Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 Thanks Rainsong. Yea a previous poster mentioned the Mama Bear. I hadn't heard of it. Looks great. So that would work well with a passive piezo? So yea, passive piezo and Baggs is not enough. And no I haven't used the Sunrise with a tube pre. Just the Baggs. As we all know every guitar is a different play, so between my 3 main acoustics (the martin w/peizo, sj-200 with sunrise, or taylor with fishman) I'm always switching up what I want to play. So in order to invest $350 in a mama bear or nice tube pre I'd have to make sure I play the martin or gibson enough. It's easy to use the Taylor with eq and volume in easy position on the guitar. ok now I'm rambling about too many choices... thanks again everyone- keep talkin-brian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted November 8, 2006 Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 A passive piezo pick-up will sound just fine through an appropriate active DI, a DI/eq like the Baggs, or with on-board electrionics w/ eq. With a reasonable length of cable, and a reasonable input impedance (my preference as a designer is around 750k-1M ohm) there's no difference with respect to where the active electronics is. There is a difference between different active electronics packages, some have built in eq curves independant to the tone controls or on-board user adjustable eq, and this will account for much difference between units. Also, electronics designed for a specific pickup/guitar combination will generally be a better choice since the engineer designing the product has control of more voicing variables (types of eq filter shapes) concerning the system's response. More often than not, those are built into the guitar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members bassred Posted November 8, 2006 Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 THe Aura I was talking about is the Martin Aura guitar, which has a smaller version of the Aura unit built in, you can select which image and blend it with the peizo, I couldn't find anything to complain about with it. Acoustic guitar is going to sound like acoustic guitar, from there you EQ it to taste. I use a Martin with a peizo (no preamp) into a DOD Bi-fet preamp pedal and it smooths out the peizo sound quite nicely and only cost $65 bucks, as a bonus, it works as a great buffer for my upright bass pickup (which was giving me some impedance issues ) I'd say it was money well spent, especially considering I bought it like 8 years ago!!! It's still kickin'! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rbts Posted November 8, 2006 Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 If a Taylor with a fishman blender is not good enough.... I don't know what would be. But sometimes there is an awful lot of electornics involved in getting something to sound like it is not even plugged in. Like someone else said "unplugged" really means "more plugged" sometimes. Um what about that Line Six Variax acoustic ever checked that out? I have been thinking that maybe if I get another guitar,f I might get one of those... it is exactly what it was made for...? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members bmusic Posted November 8, 2006 Author Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 Originally posted by Rbts If a Taylor with a fishman blender is not good enough.... I don't know what would be. Hey Rbts, no the Taylor with Fishman is usually great. However my style of writing and playing usually leans towards big open chords (think ryan adams, neil young), and I like playing on big dreadnoughts. The taylor small body sounds great but can be thin and boxy. I'm just comparing the two; I wish my dreadnoughts had the fishman in them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members satchownz Posted November 8, 2006 Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 great thread. I have a Fender DG20 that I use a dimarzio removable humbucker. I like it, but it's not very crisp. Could that be the guiatar more than the pickup? I'd like to buy a taylor, the ones I've player are clean and snappy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RainsongDR1000 Posted November 8, 2006 Members Share Posted November 8, 2006 Originally posted by agedhorse A passive piezo pick-up will sound just fine through an appropriate active DI, a DI/eq like the Baggs, or with on-board electrionics w/ eq. With a reasonable length of cable, and a reasonable input impedance (my preference as a designer is around 750k-1M ohm) there's no difference with respect to where the active electronics is. Normally I would never think to disagree with the aged one, but i will on this. It's not only the additional gain but the buffering in the preamp of active preamps that i think makes them sound better than a passive one even into an active DI. even running a cord as short as 6 foot from a high impedance passive piezo before it hits the preamp can degrade the signal considerably. Also the Baggs PADI has a 10 megaohm input impedance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 I can tell you with assurity that the input buffer of a typical active DI is IDENTICAL to that of the average on-board preamp. I've designed a few of them over the years. 6' of good quality cable will be about 80-100pF of load which is virtually zero, but 25' of cable might be noticeable. 50' will definately be noticeable on most passive pickups. Each doubling of cable length will decrease the 6dB rolloff frequency by one octave. There will be effect at both the low end and high end, but for different reasons. One is transfer efficiency and the other is RC filtering. The high frequency RC filter effect is not a problem as a passive piezo pickup has a frequency response that rises with frequency and is always rolled off anyway. The only real problem with cable hanging off a passive pickup is mechanical noise caused by the cable itself. There are conductive fabrics and fillers that are used to reduce this effect. The active on-board preamps will generally have a LOT of eq so it's not the active input buffer that's responsible for the difference in the sound. A few even have DSP processing!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Scodiddly Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 This is where I always disagree with agedhorse - I don't think that a typical active DI, with the usual ~1Mohm input impedance, is a good choice for all piezo pickups. I have a little DIY buffer amp I carry around (schematics at http://www.scotthelmke.com/mbb.html) with an input impedance around 8Mohm. It doesn't always help, but often enough it makes a pretty obvious improvement in the sound from a piezo pickup. It's roughly similar in input impedance to a Baggs or Fishman DI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 Most (but not all) input buffers have a pretty significant shunt capacitor (your example did as well before changing it to 1pF) to deal with RFI because some piezo pickups are not well shielded. Input impedance does have an effect on the sound, but it testing with common piezos, found around 1M to be the best compromise. I have seen plenty of cases where 10Meg has caused unuseable RFI in noisy RF environments, especially under high gain conditions. Fortunately, piezos put out a relatively high signal voltage (though very low current drive) so the high gain issues are not as big of a problem. Active DI's have an input of generally between 1M and 4.7M. A few have 10M but RFI becomes a real tradeoff in some areas. The RFI problems, along with a slightly more articulate sound is why I prefer a lower impedance. It's not something cut in stone, but you might try putting a 4.7meg resistor in series with something like a 4.7 meg trim pot (it that's even available) and try adjusting this to see where it sounds best to you. You might be surprised. You might also try increasing the input RFI cap (1pf) to something like 20-100pF and see if you might like that result too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Scodiddly Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 Just with the listening comparison between ~2.2Mohm input impedance and my ~8Mohm... there's often (though not always) a very clear difference. The main difference is in low frequency response, but there's usually some quality difference in the mids as well. Again, it does depend on the particular pickup, but I've found it well worth trying if the tone is unsatisfactory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RainsongDR1000 Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 Here is a quote from Rick Turner, partner with Seymour Duncan of D-tar acoustic research, inventor of MAma Bear acoustic modeler and pioneer in the filed of acoustic amplification, although it seems like aged horse may have already addressed these and may be more on the same page than I thought:"...under piezo saddle pickups are really poor line drivers... the output signal tends to be a very high impedance source and is thus negatively affected by cable capacitance and any discontinuities in shielding which introduce hum and noise. Also, with the pickup being a very high impedance source, the cable running from it tends to be very microphonic. Some pickups do kind of OK running passive. A lot of piezo crystal pickups seem to to well enough with up to about 8 feet of cable, but even then, performance is better with a good on-board buffered preamp. Ideally, the pickup is matched to the onboard preamp which has sufficient headroom, low noise and whose input impedance has been "tuned" to the specific pickup. If you're running passive than your signal is at the mercy of whatever DI you plug into..." With active pickups like the Baggs Active Element or D-tar Wavelength out there for $100- $115, why go the passive route and take the chance? BTW, these have no EQ, just what's in the preset voicing of the preamp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 I used to be in the acoustic pickup business... I am intimately familiar with the technical issues. It's not trivial stuff at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DunedinDoug Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 Originally posted by bmusic Hey Rbts, no the Taylor with Fishman is usually great. However my style of writing and playing usually leans towards big open chords (think ryan adams, neil young), and I like playing on big dreadnoughts.The taylor small body sounds great but can be thin and boxy. I'm just comparing the two; I wish my dreadnoughts had the fishman in them. I, too, have a Taylor 714CE, so in response to this thread I swapped out my Whirlwind IMP DI for a tube mic preamp last night just for comparison's sake. I noticed no appreciable difference in the mic side of the the Fishman Blender. The piezo side sounded slightly more open. I can't say the test convinced me to discard a non-powered DI the size and shape of a deck of cards for my powered, rack-mountable preamp. Neither device made my Taylor sound like a big-bodied Martin dreadnought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rbts Posted November 9, 2006 Members Share Posted November 9, 2006 I continue to wonder if "you guys" think that that Line Six Variax Acoustic might be able to sound like a Martin Dreadnaught... as well as a few other guitars that it is supposed to "model"? I think bajazzz uses one, and i noticed that Larry Gatlin was using one the other night on TV. I like stuff that helps keep things simple and consistant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members fuzzball Posted November 12, 2006 Members Share Posted November 12, 2006 Originally posted by Rbts I continue to wonder if "you guys" think that that Line Six Variax Acoustic might be able to sound like a Martin Dreadnaught... as well as a few other guitars that it is supposed to "model"?I think bajazzz uses one, and i noticed that Larry Gatlin was using one the other night on TV.I like stuff that helps keep things simple and consistant. It will not sound just like the real guitar, though it can work very nice and give you a good sound. I would recommend going to a store and testing it out before you get one to make sure it produces the desired sound. Personaly I like a real acoustic, it just seems right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members SpruceApple Posted November 13, 2006 Members Share Posted November 13, 2006 Originally posted by bmusic Hi folks,I've always craved the 'real' sound of an unplugged acoustic, yet only plugged in. .....I usually run EQ pretty flat as I don't know the nuances very well.......How can I get that wood sound/warmth back in?thanks!brian Listen to Rainsong and others. A Fishman Aura or DTAR Mama Bear outboard processor will give you exactly what you're asking for. And it will work well with your Martin, Gibson, and your Taylor. Give it a try. It will probably be the best money you've ever spent on your live acoustic guitar sound. BTW...you don't see many D-19's. How long have you had it? Best wishes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members bmusic Posted November 13, 2006 Author Members Share Posted November 13, 2006 There is an indie guitar shop nearby that carries Mama Bear. I may trade in a bunch of old gear and pick one up. Thanks for the conviction. My D-19 is 1982; yea I have never seen another. I bought it used in the mid 90's. One of my first acoustics I bought when I was about 20. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members SpruceApple Posted November 13, 2006 Members Share Posted November 13, 2006 When you try the Mama Bear, take the time to play around with both the source guitar and target guitar settings. You will definitely find some good tones. Also, for both Aura and Mama, most players seem to like the effect level set to around 40% for live playing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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