I even designed it to be safely removable / reusable on different instruments. The ideal scenario being that I could use the same pickup design all the way from double bass range up to violin range and get good performance, which I think is possible based on my testing. Mainly, my pickup is meant for more than just mandolin, so I designed it to have the lowest possible bass response. That's usually a room problem, not a pickup/preamp problem. You can hear mine in the recordings, unedited the lows aren't excessive at all. In fairness most mandolins produce relatively little sound below 250Hz, since the low G is 196Hz and the power of the sound is in the harmonics above. Like I said: you can always cut the excess on higher-end mixers or in the computer, but you can't fix what doesn't get recorded, which is the main problem with affordable piezo pickups with no preamps - often all the lows get cut off, sometimes as high as 1kHz or more. But your pickup is yours, and good pickups are very expensive in my country so most people use whatever they can afford, which too often are the cheap piezo ones that don't have preamps. Yes I agree about yours, and that's good. Last edited by ohnoitsalobo Aug-15-2020 at 4:36am. I haven't seen very many commercial piezo preamps that do this. My preamp also has the added benefit of balanced audio, which doubles the signal amplitude and rejects noise, so that helps plenty. The only one I've had the chance to use personally is the Fishman Loudbox and it sounded pretty good. The only inputs I've seen that handle piezos well are rated for 10 MΩ or more, and they're surprisingly rare. I have a friend who has the Fishman V200 pickup, and it has the same problems despite its price tag (but the fact that it's a bridge pickup is also responsible for the lack of good "body", I feel) Most mixer line ins are much less than 1MΩ, so of course the problem only gets worse. That said, I've used my piezo with commercial DI boxes (as well as seen others do the same with clip-on and other commercial pickups), and they all still have the same problem of dropping the bass - they can't handle the piezo even with supposed 1 MΩ impedance, and end up sounding "quacky" and shrill (BSS AR133 is a commonly used one where I am). That's what I used here, it seemed pretty representative. The M-Audio instrument inputs are 1 MΩ according to the manual, which is similar to a lot of stage and recording DI boxes. Except for the kalimba, which got way too much finger noise - I moved that much closer to the sound hole. I went with the simplest guaranteed outcome - on the body close to the bridge. I did experiment a little with placement, but most of the instruments aren't mine so time was limited. To see if there are locations that are noticeably better than others. If you experimented with the location of the pick up on the instrument Or pre-amp made specifically for piezo use.įrankly, while I like the effort, the comparison recording you are doing Who are less interested in soldering I suggest buying a commercial DI box For those considering piezo pickups (and I would) I think all DIīoxes designed for piezo use have pre-amps in them. It loads the piezo so it cannot drive an adequate signal level. The magic happens in the preamp, the page has links to the circuits that I started from.The input impedance of that M-Audio box is way too low for a piezo transducer. "Raw" audio is the piezo directly connected to the line input, while the "preamp" audio uses the mic connection for phantom power. All recorded using a M-Audio Fast Track Ultra.
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