Piezo pickup question
Posted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 5:44 pm
Hi,
New to the forum but have been the proud owner of a ‘98 fly classic since 2014. If you don’t want to read my Parker story the question is the last paragraph. A few years ago I decided I wanted to do a few modifications for a number of reasons 1) the sound of the pups, while I didn’t hate them, didn’t give the warmth and depth I would like. So I bought some gen 2’s, and planned to disconnect mags from the preamp. 2) the controls layout is not ergonomic, especially the location of the mag selector switch. 3) I wanted to add some fun things like a kill switch. And 4) probably the main motivational reason I had a short or something somewhere that would drain the battery when not in use. One of the ribbon cables was slightly torn but I couldn’t verify if that was the culprit.
Long story short, I’m not a complete novice at soldering but this is the first guitar I’ve decided to do myself. My guitar tech clearly didn’t want to do the project and after some thought I believe my love for this guitar project will yield better results. I’m just finally getting to it now and having a blast. I’m mostly done, just waiting on 2 latching switches for coil splitting each pickup. I decided to gut the electrical cavity put a kill switch where master volume was, master volume where mag volume was, neck coil splitter where mag selector was, bridge coil splitter where mag/piezo was, and the pickup selector where piezo volume/tune was, tone stayed put, remove the preamp all together, customize a fishman end pin jack to fit, use the hole for the stereo/mono button as an IO switch for the led lights on the tesi kill switch and tesi 2 color led switches for the coil splits so I can conserve the battery even while plugged in since the guitar is completely passive other than 3 leds that are on there own circuit ( the jack still needs to be plugged in for the lights to work).
The question:
I didn’t remove the piezo pickup from the bridge, I didn’t touch anything connected to the bridge or the strings except to ground the bridge to the volume pot. Is there still a passive piezo sound in my signal? I kinda thought there could be but before I go through all that I wanted to hear how it sounded (I might discover plutonium or I might die from radiation). The guitar is playable just without the coil splits so I plugged it in and it sounds good and all but when I tap the body with my hand it comes through the speakers as though a microphone diaphragm is attached (a piezo). I grabbed my strat and while it wasn’t completely silent it was drastically quieter when hitting the body much harder in fact. So it’s either a passive piezo signal still present or the fact that the fly has just that much less mass. I’m inclined to think the piezo is still in the signal and, while I don’t hate it, I’d like to be able to either disconnect it from the signal in some way, like a switch, so I could compare the difference or in a way that I could put it back in without too much difficulty.
Thanks for any input you may have.
New to the forum but have been the proud owner of a ‘98 fly classic since 2014. If you don’t want to read my Parker story the question is the last paragraph. A few years ago I decided I wanted to do a few modifications for a number of reasons 1) the sound of the pups, while I didn’t hate them, didn’t give the warmth and depth I would like. So I bought some gen 2’s, and planned to disconnect mags from the preamp. 2) the controls layout is not ergonomic, especially the location of the mag selector switch. 3) I wanted to add some fun things like a kill switch. And 4) probably the main motivational reason I had a short or something somewhere that would drain the battery when not in use. One of the ribbon cables was slightly torn but I couldn’t verify if that was the culprit.
Long story short, I’m not a complete novice at soldering but this is the first guitar I’ve decided to do myself. My guitar tech clearly didn’t want to do the project and after some thought I believe my love for this guitar project will yield better results. I’m just finally getting to it now and having a blast. I’m mostly done, just waiting on 2 latching switches for coil splitting each pickup. I decided to gut the electrical cavity put a kill switch where master volume was, master volume where mag volume was, neck coil splitter where mag selector was, bridge coil splitter where mag/piezo was, and the pickup selector where piezo volume/tune was, tone stayed put, remove the preamp all together, customize a fishman end pin jack to fit, use the hole for the stereo/mono button as an IO switch for the led lights on the tesi kill switch and tesi 2 color led switches for the coil splits so I can conserve the battery even while plugged in since the guitar is completely passive other than 3 leds that are on there own circuit ( the jack still needs to be plugged in for the lights to work).
The question:
I didn’t remove the piezo pickup from the bridge, I didn’t touch anything connected to the bridge or the strings except to ground the bridge to the volume pot. Is there still a passive piezo sound in my signal? I kinda thought there could be but before I go through all that I wanted to hear how it sounded (I might discover plutonium or I might die from radiation). The guitar is playable just without the coil splits so I plugged it in and it sounds good and all but when I tap the body with my hand it comes through the speakers as though a microphone diaphragm is attached (a piezo). I grabbed my strat and while it wasn’t completely silent it was drastically quieter when hitting the body much harder in fact. So it’s either a passive piezo signal still present or the fact that the fly has just that much less mass. I’m inclined to think the piezo is still in the signal and, while I don’t hate it, I’d like to be able to either disconnect it from the signal in some way, like a switch, so I could compare the difference or in a way that I could put it back in without too much difficulty.
Thanks for any input you may have.