Pickups

[matthias@bahianet.com.br (Matthias Grob)]

>My first suggestion for acoustic looping is, GET GOOD PICKUPS!!!  Your
>looping tone is going to be no better than its raw tone.
>
>I have a Fishman Blender system that uses a piezo bridge pickup in
>combination with an internal condenser microphone.  It's very good at
>sounding similar to an acoustic guitar.  Piezo pickups alone are terrible,
>i think.  They're missing "air".

If you listen on headphones, I agree. If you put them to speakers, you get
the "air" between the speakers and the ear. With the mic, you get "air"
twice.
Reverb helps a lot to simulate "air", too. You can even use a parametric
filter to simulate the body resonance, if you like that. But usually the
oposit happens: To make the mic sound useable, you have to filter out the
body resonance with a parametric filter. I use my piezos directly under the
string, without any filtering, just reverb. It sounds neither accoustic nor
electric nor plastic, but crystalic, clean, full and extremely dynamic.

Microphones create feedback, grab noises, are expensive (if any good)...

If a pickup sounds thin, the preamlification probably is not enough high
impedance or to far away so the bass is eaten.
If it sounds resonancy, weak, unequal, there usually is a mechanical short
cirquit around the pickup - in other words the bridge transmits string
vibrations to the body without passing through the pickup.
If it sounds plastic, usually there is plasic between pickup and string.


Matthias