The moment has come
We do not longer want to keep our famous PARADIS piezo pickup exclusively for the PARADIS guitars. It has grown to a state of perfection ready for serial production. We offer it now to serious manufacturers of high class guitars. Thus, musicians could have a clean sounding and feedback free pickup in an instrument of their choice.
Most known guitarplayers in Switzerland use PARADIS instruments. Max Lässer loves the pickup on his guitars and Andreas Vollenweider 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 the string as directly as possible and to exclude the vibrations coming from the body or other strings. The character of the instrument is retained as the body influences the string vibrations. The pickup should not influence the sound - personality lies in the playing technique, the instrument and maybe electronic effects.
To register the sound an acoustic instrument radiates, there is only one ideal solution: a good microphone. But on stage, this can lead to uncontrolled feedback, and in many situations the strong resonances of an acoustical impedance transformer (hollow body) do not improve the over all sound and would have to be filtered. Further, todays music often demands a sound that is more clear and broadbanded than the hollow body can vibrate. In these cases and for separating the signals of the individual strings, there is a brilliant solution: the bridge pickup.
In the PARADIS piezo pickup, for most direct transducing, we avoided plastic materials that can color the sound and wear of. The sensor is tilted to pick up the string force in the direction of its action. The mechanical contact between the low mass covering metal and the stiff base is reduced to its minimum. Thus all string energy is applied on the sensor and no body vibrations can reach the crystal - the only way to produce a constant high output and eliminate body feedback and crosstalk from the other strings.
Note: Feedback still happens, if the string becomes activated by the loudspeaker. This kind of feedback can be controlled by the player but only avoided by changing the acoustic sensitivity of the lnstrument.
The small independent units for individual strings allow individual fitting for any kind of instrument with any number of strings, variable spacing and tuning mechanisms. If the standard brass base is not suitable, we can build the pickup into a nut of the dimensions 2,7l x 2,0h x 8w in your bridge.
We recommend separate preamplification for each string to eliminate losses and adapt frequency response.
At the same time, may we recommend our hexaphonic preamplifier and the unique POLYSUBBASS effect (see annex). For any other electronic inquieries we offer our experienced advice.