7/23/2023 0 Comments Piezo saddle pickupIt can resonate with the top’s movement, or the air in the guitar, and cause feedback. The ‘working/active’ part of the pickup can be made longer and, once the slot is full, the unused portion just pokes though the hole in the bottom of the saddle.Īs a side note, be careful of this extra active part inside the guitar. All its internals are flexible and the whole thing can be easily bent (don’t kink it).īecause it’s more flexible, it’s not tied to a particular length of saddle or slot. Pickups like LR Baggs’ Ribbon don’t employ rigid conductors like the Fishman. It needs careful installation in a flat slot with a perfectly flat saddle bottom over it. Oh, and you should definitely be careful of the joint where the cable connects - it can be delicate. It doesn’t bend much (nor should you try bend it). The conductor strips and wrapping give this pickup an amount of rigidity. It has a piezo strip between two conductor strips (hot and ground) and it’s wrapped in a (grounded) shielding tape to keep any nasty electromagnetic interference (EMI) away from the internals. This is what I refer to as a ‘rigid’ UST. Each operates on essentially the same principal - a piezo ‘strip’ is sandwiched between a hot and ground conductor and is shielded all around in some way - but how they achieve this is slightly different. More possibilities opened up for UST pickup design and, as things have shaken out, we’ve ended up with three main types. Now it was possible to make a single element span the full length of a saddle slot. No more need for housings and individual elements for each string. Through the application of liberal amounts of “science” these boffins were able to make thin, flexible, plastic sheets that were essentially big, flat, piezo elements. Yeah, Science!Īround thirty years ago, men and women with high foreheads, wearing white coats, and carrying clipboards started doing weird things with various plastics. Careful positioning is more critical and they may not be ideal if your guitar has an odd string spacing. They work fine but, because there are six discrete elements, they can be fussy about placement - if each element isn’t directly under a string, you can easily have output imbalances from string to string. And this is what some USTs are still like, especially at the budget end of the market.
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