Photonic guitar pickup has fiber Fabry-Perot cavity

[Rick Turner]

Mike, you may not be aware of this, but I do provide it...including a digital preamp with transfer functions derived from 16 acoustic guitars. Welcome to D-TAR! Acoustic Guitar Pickups and Preamps We demonstrated the first acoustic guitar digital modeling preamp in 2003 at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival.

I've been making commercially available piezo pickups since 1991, first as a partner in Highlander Musical Audio, then under my own name and as Renaissance Guitars, and since 2002 in partnership with Seymour Duncan under the Duncan-Turner Acoustic Research brand name.

Been there, done that, still doing it.

[Rick Turner]

The piezo polymer pickups all need gain in addition to buffering, and they are incredibly sensitive to cable capacitance. You can lose about 1 dB per foot of reasonably decent coax cable, so you really want that buffer close to the source. Our D-TAR Timberline and Wavelength pickups use PVDF; the Timberline uses it in a coax cable so it actually picks up all around its axis. The Wavelength is flat and thus pressure directional (and easier to install)

Piezo ceramics, such as I use in my Electroline bass pickups and also when I make pickups for upright bass, have more voltage output and are not as sensitive to cable losses, and so are often used passively.

In all cases, shielding is incredibly important. These are very high impedance devices, and as such hum pickup is a very real issue. With piezos, too much shielding is rarely enough!

[Mike Sulzer]

Mike, you may not be aware of this, but I do provide it...including a digital preamp with transfer functions derived from 16 acoustic guitars. Welcome to D-TAR! Acoustic Guitar Pickups and Preamps We demonstrated the first acoustic guitar digital modeling preamp in 2003 at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival.

I've been making commercially available piezo pickups since 1991, first as a partner in Highlander Musical Audio, then under my own name and as Renaissance Guitars, and since 2002 in partnership with Seymour Duncan under the Duncan-Turner Acoustic Research brand name.

Been there, done that, still doing it.

No, I did not know that you do that. Mama bear sounds like a bargain at about $350.

I think the real challenge is to provide the inverse transfer function required to take out the client's guitar/pickups, etc., so that the simulation process starts with a known input.

[Rick Turner]

We did that, too, as well as we could given that there are so many possibilities.

There's an "Input Source" selector switch with 16 positions worth of source correction possibilities as well as another 16 position switch with "target" guitar models.

I started working conceptually on Mama Bear in 1989 when Cliff Elion, my chief engineer at Gibson Labs demonstrated what I beleive was the first digital modeling electric guitar amp prototype. Gibson top brass didn't want anything to do with this whole thing, so we were told to drop it. I wound up taking the idea for the acoustic modeler to Martin Guitars around 1995, and they rejected it. I think my mistake was telling Chris Martin that with this device, an Ovation could be made to sound like a credible D-28 (true, as it turns out...). Finally I met up with the folks at Seymour Duncan in 2001, and we did it. Only took 12 years to get someone with some dough to believe in it...

[Mike Sulzer]

Finally I met up with the folks at Seymour Duncan in 2001, and we did it. Only took 12 years to get someone with some dough to believe in it...

The other important thing that happened in those twelve years was that digital electronics got a lot faster and more convenient to use. This would have been expensive in 1989. Do you do your own digital electronics and programming, or do you hire someone in the right age group?

[Rick Turner]

Without addressing your rather insulting "right age group" remark, I'll just say that we did all the analog and some of the digital work in house and brought in a programming expert who is also very good at circuit design...analog and digital...for the rest.

[Mike Sulzer]

Without addressing your rather insulting "right age group" remark, I'll just say that we did all the analog and some of the digital work in house and brought in a programming expert who is also very good at circuit design...analog and digital...for the rest.

I am not trying to insult you; you did what I would have done: developed the concepts to the point where you knew you had a product and then brought in someone with the experience to implement a fair amount of processing in an efficient and relatively inexpensive package. That almost always means someone younger than you or I.

[Rick Turner]

Mike, there's a long distance between "would have done" and "did it", and decades of experience are part of that difference in being able to actually get something done and coming in as Johnny Come Lately and saying, "I could have done that..."

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Yeah, when you're walking an already blazed trail...

Meanwhile, I've got to get back to some actual guitar building here and stop getting caught up in just talkin' shit.

[Mike Sulzer]

Mike, there's a long distance between "would have done" and "did it", and decades of experience are part of that difference in being able to actually get something done and coming in as Johnny Come Lately and saying, "I could have done that..."

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Yeah, when you're walking an already blazed trail...

Meanwhile, I've got to get back to some actual guitar building here and stop getting caught up in just talkin' shit.

Oh, do you have some competition? Not me; I am too busy with radar signal processing.

[Rick Turner]

Oh, Mike, well that's much more important that mere discussions of guitar pickups. I'll not bother you anymore...

[Mike Sulzer]

Oh, Mike, well that's much more important that mere discussions of guitar pickups. I'll not bother you anymore...

As you wish. I did not mean that it was important, just that it is my job, and so until I retire, it occupies most of my time. I do not mean to cut off any conversation.

[David Schwab]

Gibson top brass didn't want anything to do with this whole thing, so we were told to drop it.

That's because it didn't tune itself!

See the catch up game they are doing now? They bought out companies like OpCode, and patented all this MIDI and signal processing stuff, and and then come out with goofy guitars like this:

Gibson.com: Gibson Dusk Tiger

Oh look... it has "Chameleon Tone"!

Just programable EQ though, and no impulse modeling. Guess they didn't want to reinvent the Mama Bear or Variax...

[cozy]

So now there are two (however experimental) photonic pickup systems around. I suppose the question is whether or not they can replace what's out there already. I've heard that magnetic pickups can dampen string vibration, and as I understand piezoelectrics can be difficult to work with on instruments equipped with Floyd Rose style bridges. Would this mean that light-based pickups are a viable alternative? Could piezoelectrics ("dot" and saddle) be utilized, in concert, with light-beam and laser (FBG) pickups, to achieve a near-perfect range of input from an instrument?

[Steve Conner]

Rick, the D-Tar technology sounds pretty impressive. It's nice that you spent the extra to go floating-point, and you actually have a latency spec there.

Could you use the Mama Bear preamp with a solid-body piezo guitar that had a "null transfer function", if you like. Or at least as close to a neutral sound as you can reasonably get. Then you would have a guitar that could sound like any of the acoustic models, but without feedback hassles.

Oh wait, did I just reinvent the Variax?

I worked for a few fiber optics places during the telecoms boom. The whole business has just been a mess of solutions looking for problems ever since, and this Bragg grating pickup is probably just the latest one.

I made my money designing drive circuitry for other peoples' optical gizmos, and came out of it quite well, since that was the low-risk part of the business. I actually have a product in the Thorlabs catalog, which I'm quite proud of.

"Fabry-Perot Cavity" was always a dirty word, because more often than not it was an unwanted resonator that hurt the product's performance.

[RedHouse]

...The whole business has just been a mess of solutions looking for problems...

And the musical instrument business, software business, networking, hand-held communication devices business, televisions, and... and... and...

Call me a Luddite but IMHO some shit just doesn't need a technology upgrade.

Cracks me up every time I see Microsoft wanting to put Windows Embeded in my fridge so it can call Safeway.com and order my groceries.

Like the toaster for instance, put toast in....press down lever...toast pop's up. There's no need for an LCD display, microcontroller, pre-programmed Bagel, Eggo or Pop-Tart settings, certainly don't need a clock on there to have to reset along with the one on the microwave and stove.

I had to buy a new cell phone last week, jeeezuz-criminardy what a bunch of techno crap we've got going on these days.

My phone needs are fairly simple, phone & text, quad band and unlocked for when I travel. I am old and need reading glasses (read-only, not full time glasses) so every time I look at the little over-populated screens on these new phones, I have to dig my glasses out of my pocket. I don't need "apps"/"Widgets" icons all over my phone. All the brands had overloading their offerings with way too much techno-crap, and wanting hundereds of dollars for the devices.

Yeah, they've solved a bunch of problems we didn't have, and, want us to pony-up the extra dosh ($) in the process. Yep, solutions looking for a problem, and if the problem isn't there, give it a spin (doctor) and make people feel they need it for that problem.