Retro fitting piezo into PRS

W

waylander69

Inspired
Hi
Looking for a bit of feedback on a mad thought I have had,

I like prs guitars, for the money the SE versions have a high build quality and if you pick one up second hand you can score a bargain.

So since I have a collection of PRS, one american c24, one se c24, one singlecut se and a tremonti se.

was thinking of retro fitting a bridge piezo into something like a se 245 or a DGT

anybody got any experience in fitting bridge peizos , I realise a little woodwork will be involved ,
have successfully changed out pic ups before

however if there are other budget guitar you could recommend for this plan i'm open for opinions.

Looking for recommendations for type of piezo , for ease of fit and sound quality.

thanks in advance

G :)
 
My personal experience is limited to Graphtech and Fishman, where I prefer the Graphtech. The simplest way is to buy a piezo fitted bridge which fits the PRS bridge post size and spacing. The harder part is fitting circuit board, battery and controls into the guitar. You need to decide what you want to do about controls: volume and switching. My decision, which may not work for you, was not to have any piezo controls on the guitar, but to run a stereo cable from guitar to Axe-FX, and do the switching with midi.
 
My experience with adding a piezo bridge to my guitar was, that for my needs a passive piezo system was totally sufficient (well, it doesn't really sound like a real acoustic guitar, but it's still a nice effect, especially when used in a band mix). I didn't even add tone and volume controls to it.

So what I did was:
- replacing the bridge
- filling a small hole into the ring of the bridge humbucker
- wind a black rubber around the wires so that it looks better (since the guitar has a black body)
- replace the 1/4" jack with a stereo jack
- pull the wires through the hole on the bridge pickup and then use the existing holes in the body to connect it to the stereo jack ring connector
- connect the magnetic pickups output wire to the tip and both the piezo and magnetic ground to the sleeve of the stereo jack
- profit

In the end, I use the Axe FX II anyway, so why bother adding tone or volume to the piezo output? Instead, I control EQ and volume directly in the presets and have the full freedom to mix piezo and magnetic signal in the presets.

All you need then is an Y cable (TRS to double TS) and two volume blocks at the beginning of the grid to seperate the left (magnetic) and right (piezo) channel.

No woodwork required. Easy solution. Recommended!
 

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PM ShotGunDunn. He's a member here and has done several installs. (Les Paul, Ibanez edge trem etc.). There should even be some threads floating around about those.
 
Thanks for the input so far guys, going to wait and see what Scott's tone match promise holds,

as the piezo idea is not a burning issue,

any more ideas keep them coming
cheers
G \../
 
If you are just after acoustic simulation then I'm with Scott on this. In the past I used piezos to get closer to an acoustic sound, but recent experience is that tone matching, multi-band compression, and EQ can produce good results with magnetic pickups.
 
Scott Peterson said:
I did a preset on the Axe-FX II using Tone matching and decided that installing a piezo was not necessary. Details to come in a separate post; but you might not need to do this at all.
Click to expand...
I did something similar with the Mama Bear IRs. I have three guitars with piezos (2xParker, 1 Driskill) but with the right presets I don't consider it to be essential to usable "acoustic" tones.

I did this clip with my non-piezo MusicMan Axis Super Sport:
 
I did something similar with the Mama Bear IRs. I have three guitars with piezos (2xParker, 1 Driskill) but with the right presets I don't consider it to be essential to usable "acoustic" tones.
Click to expand...

Was your sound clip done with single coils or humbuckers, do you think it makes a difference when using a tone match patch to simulate an acoustic tone

G \../
 
Scott Peterson said:
I did a preset on the Axe-FX II using Tone matching and decided that installing a piezo was not necessary. Details to come in a separate post; but you might not need to do this at all.
Click to expand...
I don't think you can generalize that.
Piezos catch the acoustic sound of your electric guitar after all, so having a Piezo on hollowbody or semi-hollowbody guitars will yield totally different results than having a Piezo on an LP.

I heard this sound clip from a guy that had one of those piezo equipped parkers and couldn't believe how good it sounds. Then I compared mine to a piezo equipped LP and noticed the dramatic difference.

In the end, it's a matter of taste. If you got a neck single coil, you can get some good tone matches. A piezo based tone match will still sound better, most of the time. And if your guitar only got a neck humbucker, then it's definitely a no-brainer, as that 150$ piezo will add so much more tonal flexibility to the guitar than any effect I can think of. I personally love to blend the piezo sound with my magnetic pickups.


I did that retrofitting and definitely did not regret it. It's so cheap to do that and if you use the method I described above (and don't care about the visible wire), there is absolutely no risk in it, as all you need to do is replacing the jack. I ended up putting a piezo in all my guitars. It's cheap and so easy to do, but adds so much value.
 
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waylander69 said:
Was your sound clip done with single coils or humbuckers, do you think it makes a difference when using a tone match patch to simulate an acoustic tone
Click to expand...
Clip was done in with an in-between pickup setting. IME, using a full humbucker setting doesn't have the right attack on the notes.

I haven't done much tone matching. The only TM I've done to date was of my EBMM's neck single coil. Results were okay but not spectacular. While most TM presets seem to have something odd going on in the low end to my ear, I'm willing to claim pilot error on my TM results.
 
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