Howdy folks - a quick couple of questions that no doubt have been asked before:
- WHAT TYPES OF PICKUPS ARE COMMONLY USED IN CBGs (from worst to best is sound)?
- Piezo Disks
- Piezo Rods
- ?
- ?
- WHAT ARE THE COMPARABLE COSTS OF EACH TYPE?
- WHERE ARE SOME DIFFERENT PLACES TO BUY THEM?
Thx,
kieta
Replies
This is pretty long. I hope it helps.
The best pickup is the one that does the things you asked it to do.
All piezo pickups are super high impedance pickups. Some need a preamp for gain and others do not.
Rod piezos are the ones you see on acoustic electric guitars, sometimes also cable piezo. They are paired with matching impediance changing preamps, many times with built in equalizers. They need the preamp for both gain and impedance matching.
Disk piezos are used to electrify many bowed instruments. When used this way, they have some pretty expensive preamps attached to them. In this case it is just for impedance matching.
Disk piezos are used many times naked on CBG's. They are a high output device, so,unless you are trying to match impedances, they do not need a preamp as they already put out enough signal. No gain required. But because when run naked, they do not generally match up to the amp input impedance, you get that gritty overdrive sound.
All piezo pickups are ideal for when you are making an instrument without steel strings. So lets say you make that lighting fast cbg with classical guitar strings, a mag pup will not work and some form of piezo or a microphone is your answer.
In general, piezo pickups have an impedance inexcess of 10 megaohms, manyntimes more than 30 megaohms.
The other major class of pickups are the various forms of electro magnetic pickups, or mag pups. They are much lower impedance, running from 2 or 3 kilo ohms through to about 1 megaohm. In there you can work from lipstick pickups through strat style to P-90 and overwound humbuckers. As the impedance changes, the sound also does. Also, for lower impedance pups people use a warmer 250K volume pot. For higher impedance they bump up to 50K volume pots.
Within the mag pup gendre, P-90 and Humbucker are usually the highest impedance.
Humbuckers are different from other mag pups,in that there are two coils wound counter to each other. The purpose is to cancel out stray signals to the pup. Hence the name Hum Bucker . That is exactly what it does.
Flat pups are unique in a number of ways. One is the thickness. Second is the fact that they are actually a hum bucker type pickup. I have not used them yet myself ( I am saving them for when I feel maybe my work is good enough) .
So, where do you get pickups?
Disk piezo is simplest. Take them out of transducers found at electric hobby shops, from buzzer in dollar store gear, order bags of them from Gitty, with or without leads. There are a million threads here on sucessful installation of these.
Rod piezo usually comes as part of a equalizer kit or from a music store. Cable piezo as far as I know is a specialty order.
Preamps for piezo can be purchaed or simply built. Check out Tillman Preamp and piezo preamps.This site and Google are both your friend here.
Mag pups, it will depend on what you want, where you have to go to get it. There are two sources for Flat pups as far as I know.
For other types, there are custom builders. There is everything from soup to nuts in that you can get really affordable pups through Gitty or Ebay, but the price can escalate dramatically to name brands from music stores or directly from Stewart Macdonald.