Taming the Piezo Guitar Pickup

[13rian]

Hello all!

Long time reader, occasional poster, first time uploading a patch. Hope i know what i'm doing...

This is a patch i've been working on to tame the wild piezo pickup. Most guitar players have encoutered the piezo pickup on an acoustic and/or midi guitar. I play the latter and only recently started using the 'acoustic' tone that you can get out of the piezos. I use a grahptech ghost system but don't have the acousti-phonic pre-amp so it sounds kinda junky. I found this article -

http://ratcliffe.co.za/articles/piezo3.shtml

and basically took it literally to a nord patch. i also added some auto-filtering for fun. lots more work before it's fine-tuned and perfected.

5 variations so far.

1- basic piezo taming
2 - os mutantes-esque auto filter
3 - auto wah
4 - super compressed for hard strumming
5 - and a big verby one

i'll attempt to attach an mp3 of all 5 variations as well.

all comments and suggestions welcome!

- b

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Piezola0.1.mp3
Description:	all 5 variations, using graphtech pickup on electric guitar.	Download (listen)
Filename:	Piezola0.1.mp3
Filesize:	1.36 MB
Downloaded:	982 Time(s)

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piezola-v0.1.pch2
Description:	taming piezo guitar pickup	Download (listen)
Filename:	piezola-v0.1.pch2
Filesize:	2.33 KB
Downloaded:	1695 Time(s)

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[blue hell]

Cool project.

Followed the link to the artocle and listened to the audio samples there. Must say that I thought the compressed piezo sample to sound 'better' (that is if when comp2 indeed is the pieze one, which is not really said ..., and it depends on what is played, likely).

On the picture I saw the piezos being mounted in the bridge, is it usual to mount 'm that way ? I ask, as an interested and uninitiated person, because that seems to be a spot where the signal levels would be pretty low - which seems odd at first thought (and I came no further than that).

I also checked out your patch and your mp3. Think it sounds good, much better than my own experiments with self made magnetic pickups ever worked out.

Anyway, to me this sounds like something to go on with.

I suppose the noise is coming from not having the acousi-phonic gadget

[13rian]

i think maybe i should have started the mp3 clip with a bypassed tone, the raw piezo tone is pretty nasty.

the piezo pickup concept probably started as a way to mic acoustic instruments, but they have been in use for midi guitar systems for a while now too. the idea is that for midi conversion you need 6 separate signals to accurately track the 6 strings. as most of you probably know, monophonic pitch tracking works WAY better than polyphonic. so piezos were introduced at some point as a great way to get less crosstalk between signals in the hexaphonic stream. they are normally built into the saddles. this works out nicely for many of us, because the string actually touches the piezo element and therefore gives a good strong signal with minimal crosstalk.

the bonus is that when you rig up your guitar with a hexaphonic piezo pickup for midi, you can also tap into the piezo tone and use it for this nylon string acoustic type of sound with lots of attack and not so much sustain. this patch is my attempt at cleaning up that signal and making it useful enough to incorporate into my live rig. my other recent upload is the evil twin, the tube amp sim. between these 2 i'm hoping to have moved all guitar processing from reaktor (on an XP machine) to the nord, which is my goal right now.

- b

[13rian]