Cello pickups

[Brigand]

Hello,

I'm designing an electric cello
and I want to have a bridge piezo, plus an magnetic pickups too.
But I couldn't find some magnetic pickups for cellos.
Does a bass pickup do fine ? Or is a pickup very frequency-dependant ? But they wouldn't be good with arco, would they ?
I thought about taking an 8-strings guitar pickups to have a compromise between pizzicato and arco, what do you think ?

Thank you very much,

Brigand

[Leo_Gnardo]

Hello,

I'm designing an electric cello
and I want to have a bridge piezo, plus an magnetic pickups too.
But I couldn't find some magnetic pickups for cellos.
Does a bass pickup do fine ? Or is a pickup very frequency-dependant ? But they wouldn't be good with arco, would they ?
I thought about taking an 8-strings guitar pickups to have a compromise between pizzicato and arco, what do you think ?

Thank you very much,

Brigand

First thing, for magnetic pickups to work, you would have to have strings that contain iron, steel, nickel - magnetic materials. Rumor has it that some early electric bass players used Pyramid Gold intended for use on string instruments. Might also check with D'addario - they make strings for all kinds of instruments and may have something that will work for your application. You may have to have custom made pickups too, in order to match string spacing and curve. If you can find a bass pickup that fits the bill, no reason why not. Also, a blade style pickup would remove the need to have poles right under each string. (Once I fitted an Aria Pro bass with close spacing with a Lawrence blade humbucker and it sounded fan-tastic. Very happy bassist.) No reason pickups wouldn't work with arco (bowed, for those who aren't familiar with the term.) I'm sure some suggestions will show up here soon.

Electric cello, you got me thinkin' "The Move", they had that, way back when. Enormous sound, multitracked too, huge! Later became the Electric Light Orchestra, lots o hits.

[Tom Phillips]

Brigand,
There was a discussion here a few months ago about pickups for a cello. The OP desired to build the pickup but the discussion thread ended without a posted result. There may be some information in the thread that will be useful to you. You can find it at http://music-electronics-forum.com/t32943/
Cheers,
Tom

[Peter Naglitsch]

Brigand

I have built an electric cello:
Peter Naglitsch
and an electric violin:
Peter Naglitsch
I wrote in the above mentioned thread about my experience with magnetic pickups for those instruments and a few other pickups that I was commissioned to make (I should have said no) without much success.

In short:
Bowed instruments (Cello, Double bas, Viloin etc) are generally not suited for a traditional magnetic pickup construction as the movements of a bowed string is in most part perpendicular to the pickup and thus doesn't produce very good results. You need to have the coils/magnet configured in a very unorthodox way that mostly hamper the playing style (end up were the bow/other strings need to be). Take it from someone that has tried most configurations of magnetic pickups, even one with a X/Y-configuration for each string (compare to a traditional X/Y stereo mic config) and that doesn't work good enough either. To be blunt: Forget about traditional magnetic pickups.

My advice based on experience:
Use a good piezo. I have had very good results with bridge integrated piezos from Rich Barber of BTS. High impedance output and hot enough to be able to drive a guitar style amp to nice distortion and at the same time able to be hooked up directly to the FOH mixer (even thou a preamp is to prefer) to produce a very authentic sound (just ad a tad of tasteful reverb and a touch of EQ and you are there).

[Brigand]

Thank you all for you advices.
Originally, I wanted to use a Barbera bridge transducer,
but, additionnaly, I wanted (maybe naively) to have a more guitar-like sound, using magnetic pick-ups.
I found a magnetic pickup maker (REBO) for cello, but I don't really like the sound. REBO - Pickups for violin, viola, cello and doublebass

I will follow your advice and only use a brige transducer.

Thank you again.