90s piezo pickup acoustic tone

ICBM

Is possibly the worst guitar sound ever recorded.

I picked up an Indigo Girls live album recorded in 1995 yesterday… the acoustic guitar sounds are so painfully bad it's distracting from the music - that weird zingy twangy buzzy 'tone' is just awful. How could anyone ever think it sounds like an acoustic guitar? Or even better than an old-fashioned magnetic soundhole pickup - which were derided at the time for "sounding like an electric guitar". If anything this one is even worse than the 'tone' on Warren Zevon's 'Learning To Flinch' (1993) which is an Ovation and I thought couldn't be beaten…

Discuss .

xmrchi

There is nothing worst than a poo Piezo sound wise, its neither acoustic or electric, but a poor middle ground.

For me the best piezo equipped guitars are:

Japanese Takamines: Great Amplified sounds.

Gibson Chet atkins: One of the first Piezo guitars and still one of the best!

The worst:

Takamine G series: Wasp in a Jar playing the clarinet.

Parker fly : I gigged one for years a truly revolutionary guitar, but the Acoustic sounds really did leave alot to be desired.

Just my opinions however!

ESBlonde

Like many things associated with guitars it depends. First on the basic guitar, then the pickup and quite importantly on the outside systems. These PUs need to be properly loaded and then sent to a half decent mixer/PA system. In my experience the latter is so often ignored and people complain when there £400 electro acoustic sounds pants through some cheap mackie system.
I have a piezo PU system in my epiphone and I can make it sound pants plugged into anything inappropriate, but a good DI and decent system and the thing becomes monster without that nasty zingy nasal upper mid.
 

ICBM

ESBlonde said:

Like many things associated with guitars it depends. First on the basic guitar, then the pickup and quite importantly on the outside systems. These PUs need to be properly loaded and then sent to a half decent mixer/PA system. In my experience the latter is so often ignored and people complain when there £400 electro acoustic sounds pants through some cheap mackie system.
I have a piezo PU system in my epiphone and I can make it sound pants plugged into anything inappropriate, but a good DI and decent system and the thing becomes monster without that nasty zingy nasal upper mid.
 

Exactly - the difference even with the same pickup through different preamps and amplification can be huge. I've recently upgraded my Fishman Pro EQ to a Fishman Aura, and even just using the pickup preamp - not the mic modelling - on the Aura, the sound is vastly improved... and this is just with the same simple Fishman undersaddle pickups I've always had in the guitars, in one case since 1989. This is one of the main reasons I don't like building the electronics into the guitar.

Obviously decent preamps didn't exist back then! But really, I'm just puzzled that this awful sound was ever not only considered acceptable, but "what acoustic guitars sound like".

Fuzzdog

I can mostly forgive trashy piezo acoustic tones live, but what really bugs me is when you hear it on studio recordings.  Why? Whywhywhywhywhy?

mart

ICBM said:

... How could anyone ever think it sounds like an acoustic guitar? ...

Pavlovian conditioning. You go to a concert, you see someone playing an acoustic guitar (always an Ovation), you hear the plinky zingy sound, you get trained to think that's what an acoustic sounds like.

Once enough of Joe Public have made that association, then producers/engineers have to give that sound. Otherwise people say "that's not an acoustic - sounds more like a lecky".

Simples, as Mr Pavlov wouldn't have said.

mart

Greg Milner's book "Perfecting sound forever" - an absolutely fascinating read about the history of recording - emphasises the theme of live performances trying to emulate recordings, so as to make the recordings seem more realistic. This is just an example of the next step - making the recordings emulate the defects and constraints of a certain type of live performance.

thermionic

One of the reasons I love Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings - they refuse to use pickups live. Solo coming up? Take a step closer to the mike.

p90fool

thermionic;405334" said:

One of the reasons I love Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings - they refuse to use pickups live. Solo coming up? Take a step closer to the mike.

That's fine, but people go to their gigs to listen to them, I have people dancing at mine and I'm never more than 8 feet from the nearest speaker cab. The idea of using condensor mics on acoustic guitars in a rowdy boozer is laughable to me.

Even with fairly primitive outboard gear I can get a very usable acoustic sound which stands up in a solo context with a blend of undersaddle piezo and magnetic soundhole pickups.

There's no excuse for terrible plasticky piezo tones, and there never was really. As ICBM implies, it became a tone producers actually aimed for, maybe just because it was "modern" sounding.

It's worth remembering though we laugh about it now, that until the early 90s even mainstream producers wanted NEW sounds, rather than new combinations of classic sounds, which is what everyone relies on now.

richardhomer

I'm just watching the 'Planes, Trains and Eric' DVD of Eric Clapton's 2014 tour of Japan - on which he plays a gorgeous looking blue Martin OM. It's fitted with an end-pin jack but I have no idea what electronics it has - whatever it is, it has probably the best 'plugged in' acoustic sound I've ever heard.

Does anyone know what's in it?

thermionic

p90fool said:

thermionic;405334" said:

One of the reasons I love Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings - they refuse to use pickups live. Solo coming up? Take a step closer to the mike.

That's fine, but people go to their gigs to listen to them, I have people dancing at mine and I'm never more than 8 feet from the nearest speaker cab. The idea of using condensor mics on acoustic guitars in a rowdy boozer is laughable to me.

Even with fairly primitive outboard gear I can get a very usable acoustic sound which stands up in a solo context with a blend of undersaddle piezo and magnetic soundhole pickups.

If I played live I'd have no problem accepting it as a practical compromise. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are a bit of an exception as they're all about the old timey thing - I can't imagine them wearing anything manufactured after 1970. But I admire their stubbornness in a perverse way. I think they use dynamics btw.

No excuse at all for it on a studio album though!

ICBM

I can actually understand using a pickup in the studio if you deliberately want a non-natural acoustic sound - eg the Beatles using Gibson J-160Es as semi-electric guitars - but the typical 90s piezo sound is just hideous even by that standard, it just doesn't sound either like an acoustic or 'alternatively good'.

mellowsun

I dunno, not all piezo sounds bad in the mix, it depends on how you EQ it.  When I had a piezo on my old Lowden, the problem was getting too much bass, but the basic guitar sound was OK when run through an old Trace Elliott pre-amp.

I'm still quite happy with the piezo sound on this track, despite it being recorded on a cheap home PC at the time.

http://www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=41114

Voxman

I have a 1990 Washburn EA30CS Festival Series Electro-acoustic.  Anyone know what piezo is in these?  All I know is that Washburn describes it as having Equis II electronics.

ICBM

Voxman said:

I have a 1990 Washburn EA30CS Festival Series Electro-acoustic.  Anyone know what piezo is in these?  All I know is that Washburn describes it as having Equis II electronics.

I seem to remember it was actually made in England. Possibly by Ashworth or something like that.

Nothing unusual really, just a generic piezo UST strip and preamp system. The bridge itself was quite clever in that the saddles can move separately in the black frame, so it eliminates the problem of uneven string response if the bottom of the saddle or the slot aren't perfectly flat.

english_bob

richardhomer said:

I'm just watching the 'Planes, Trains and Eric' DVD of Eric Clapton's 2014 tour of Japan - on which he plays a gorgeous looking blue Martin OM. It's fitted with an end-pin jack but I have no idea what electronics it has - whatever it is, it has probably the best 'plugged in' acoustic sound I've ever heard.

Does anyone know what's in it?

A quick Google search suggests that Eric uses Carlos Juan pickups in his acoustics. http://carlosjuan.eu

UK distributor's website was offline but a dealer in Germany was asking 790EUR (£620) for the system EC uses! At that price it had better sound bloody good.