The moment has come
We do not longer want to keep our famous PARADIS piezo pickupexclusively for the PARADIS guitars. It has grown to a state ofperfection ready for serial production. We offer it now to seriousmanufacturers of high class guitars. Thus, musicians could have aclean sounding and feedback free pickup in an instrument of theirchoice.
Most known guitarplayers in Switzerland use PARADIS instruments.Max Lässer loves the pickup on his guitars and AndreasVollenweider uses it on the Cheng, together with POLYSUBBASS.Everybody agrees that it is the best pickup of its kind.
The features of the PARADIS polyphonic piezo pickup:
The main principle for achieving these qualities is to pick up thestring as directly as possible and to exclude the vibrations comingfrom the body or other strings. The character of the instrument isretained as the body influences the string vibrations. The pickupshould not influence the sound - personality lies in the playingtechnique, the instrument and maybe electronic effects.
To register the sound an acoustic instrument radiates, there isonly one ideal solution: a good microphone. But on stage, this canlead to uncontrolled feedback, and in many situations the strongresonances of an acoustical impedance transformer (hollow body) donot improve the over all sound and would have to be filtered.Further, todays music often demands a sound that is more clear andbroadbanded than the hollow body can vibrate. In these cases and forseparating the signals of the individual strings, there is abrilliant solution: the bridge pickup.
In the PARADIS piezo pickup, for most direct transducing, weavoided plastic materials that can color the sound and wear of. Thesensor is tilted to pick up the string force in the direction of itsaction. The mechanical contact between the low mass covering metaland the stiff base is reduced to its minimum. Thus all string energyis applied on the sensor and no body vibrations can reach the crystal- the only way to produce a constant high output and eliminate bodyfeedback and crosstalk from the other strings.
Note: Feedback still happens, if the string becomes activated bythe loudspeaker. This kind of feedback can be controlled by theplayer but only avoided by changing the acoustic sensitivity of thelnstrument.
The small independent units for individual strings allowindividual fitting for any kind of instrument with any number ofstrings, variable spacing and tuning mechanisms. If the standardbrass base is not suitable, we can build the pickup into a nut of thedimensions 2,7l x 2,0h x 8w in your bridge.
We recommend separate preamplification for each string toeliminate losses and adapt frequency response.
At the same time, may we recommend our hexaphonic preamplifier andthe unique POLYSUBBASS effect (seeannex). For any other electronic inquieries we offer our experiencedadvice.