When Fender offered adjustable saddles on the Tele and Strat, it seemed to fix some sort of problem that had not apparently existed before the fact.Īnd the truth is, you never intonate a guitar "correctly", the intonation varies from chord to chord. Acoustic guitars have, and had, fixed bridges, whether it was a Martin, or a Gibson archtop style. The individual saddles are not adjustable, but I think temperament is wildly overrated. The bridge has string offsets built in that assumes three wound strings and three plain strings. I've never been in contact with the company. $65 is a lot cheaper than your average pickup swap, and it adds function to the guitar. It can make for an interesting lead tone with lots of bite, and the natural voltage boost over the stock pickups plays into that, too.ĭisclosure: I just bought these and think they're an awesome deal. One benefit of the piezos sounding sort of like a mix of solid body and acoustic tone is that they make for an interesting distorted tone, it's not as fuzzed out as a distorted acoustic. I don't think that's true of the Tune-o-Matics in the Epiphones, which sound fairly "acoustic", and not much else. There are debates about how much of the sound of a guitar owes to pickups or whatever else, but it definitely sound to me like the characteristic Strat and Tele tonality comes through prominently in the piezo output. The surprising thing is that the peizo in a Tele still sound very "Tele" and the same with the Strat. Any tone shaping would have to be done with a pre-amp. A piezo element is a simple thing that converts pressure into voltage, so there not much room for sonic design, you take what you get. The Brenner piezos also come with a stereo output jack, so that it's easy to wire the piezo tip-sleeve-ring style, where you can use a stereo 1/4 jack to route the piezo to a dedicated amp, but I use wireless transmitters usually, so that wouldn't have worked for me.Īs for the sound, I think they sound less "acoustic" than the $40 piezos I put into my Epiphones, but I don't think that's a quality issue, I think that's probably more of a physics issue. But I also almost always have a volume pedal on my board, too. That might be a good cause for trying to pair the piezo with a 1 meg volume pot, but I don't mind the idea that when the piezo is activate, they guitar becomes a control-free instrument, not unlike an actual acoustic guitar. The piezos I installed in my Epiphones were about equal loudness with the PAF style humbuckers. The output of the piezos wired directly to the output jack is actually astonishingly high, the piezo is quite a bit louder than the single coil pickups. I do that because, in general, the 250k control pots are too low of resistance for the high impedance piezos, and they will decrease the output voltage of the piezo if they're in parallel with it. The way I've wired them all is with a push pull pot that when pulled up, sends the piezo directly to the output of the guitar. That's a non reversible mod, but it will never be seen so long as the Strat having of a pick guard. Installation of this piezo was the only one that required me to actually modify a guitar, I filed a channel the depth of the hookup wire from the screw hole in the pick guard, as seen in the pic below. I had QC issues with the $40 piezos mentioned on the Epi Talk, and they came from China with no instructions, nor anything extra, but these Brenner piezos look compromise free, with 1mm mono plugs for on board pre-amps, install instructions and some swag. For Strats and Teles, there's another brand called Brenner, whose Strat and Tele piezos are $65, and that's more than $40, but their quality also seems to be a lot higher. Those ones only cost $40, and are a really killer deal. I wrote about the Gibson Tune-o-Matic solution here, but that's less applicable to Strat players. Well I was cruising eBay, and I found some cheap piezo offerings for Teles, Strats and Gibson-style Tune-o-Matics, all for a rather low price, none requiring a pre-amp, and all being somewhat easy to install. I've been interested in piezo bridges for a while, because I play a lot of classic and 90's rock, Beatles, Eagles, Pearl Jam, Oasis, and all these bands have acoustic songs on their albums among hard rockers, so being able to quickly get a passable acoustic tone on the fly is very convenient, a game changer, really.ĭespite the interest, I didn't look to hard for three reasons 1) I thought you needed pre-amp in the guitar, 2) what few choices existed on the market were expensive, 3) installation looked tricky.
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