These little beasties can sound amazing in a guitar! I still have a Barcus Berry thinline (AKA Martin thinline back in the day) in my big Guild acoustic, and it still sounds great 30 years after it was installed.

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. Godin A6 Two Chambered Electro Acoustic Guitar. It has a diverse pickup configuration which can produce a diverse sound output. Best Versatile Electric guitar With Piezo : ESP LTD BB 600 Baritone Signature Electric Guitar. There are many ways.Īctually, use of piezo pickups is very OLD Skool. This is a unique guitar with a unique sound which many people will find cool and funky. 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. But in real I can not see that any piezoelectric device in audio applications offer higher quality of sound. It is probably possible to do many improvements because we can remember how big signal had on example earlier piezo turntable pickups.

Electric piezo pickup