Planning on a bass with a piezo bridge

[mahcks]

Hopefully this is in the right forum.

I'd like to build a fretless to accompany my fretted Warmoth, but I'd like to put a piezo bridge on it. Has anyone done this? Is the ground rout enough to get the signals to the control cavity?

Is there anything I need to know about mixing piezo with a single magnetic pickup? I'm guessing you put the piezo through a buffer and into the preamp.

 

[Cagey]

It's unlikely the hole drilled for the ground wire is going to allow for all the piezo lines to fit. That there will almost certainly be connectors on the lines only makes it more difficult. But, you can still use it if you open it up. You may need a long bit to do it, though, so you can either reach as far as you'll need to or lay the drill down as far as you'll need to to get the hole fairly parallel. Check these guys out, or if they're not suitable for some reason, do a search on "Aircraft Bits".

As for mixing piezos with magnetics, different manufacturers handle that differently, so you'll have to pick on something first before you'll find out how that's done. No special tricks to it, though.

 

[line6man]

Is there anything I need to know about mixing piezo with a single magnetic pickup? I'm guessing you put the piezo through a buffer and into the preamp.

Typically, you would choose a piezo buffer that also has magnetic pickup inputs. Otherwise, you can't just take the output of the piezo buffer to the input of a preamp that has a magnetic pickup tied to it. The impedance of the buffer will be much lower than that of the magnetic pickup, so the result will be extreme loading on the magnetic pickup. You need to buffer both the piezo and the magnetic pickup, so that their output impedances will match. Once you have done that, then you can feed them into a preamp.