Quote:
Originally Posted by Charmed Life Picks
Doug. Howdy. I might have known you'd be the one to know. Thanks for the link. Doug, I'm using the endpin preamp they recommend. Have you discovered any practical application to work with this rig other than that?
Also, to your knowledge, do these folks own any patents to their design? Just curious. I have ZERO interest in getting into the pickup business.
Thanks Much,
Scott Memmer
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I don't know about a patent, but I suspect not. I recall way back when David first popped up with these, there was lots of discussion about the technology on the old RMMGA group. I seem to recall the buzz was that it was claimed to be some military or NASA material that had just become available, and David started experimenting. There were lots of versions at first, as you might guess from the numbers. I assume #27 was his 27th variation! With a #54 being a pair of 27s :-) Somewhere I probably still have some of the older revs, 10s, 20s, whatever they were. In the early days, people were taping them all over the place, including on the outside of the guitar - which I actually had better luck with sound-wise than when I tried inside the guitar - just not very practical. In any case, I'm pretty sure he didn't invent the actual material, he just applied it to a guitar pickup. There's lots of these sort of piezo-electric materials out there, used in non-musical manufacturing sensor applications. Someone could just start collecting these and trying them on guitar, which I think is basically what David did.
I've use the PUTWs with lots of preamps, from the PUTW Power Plug, to the Pendulum SPS-1, Raven Labs PMB-1, etc. It's better, I think, to have the preamp as close to the pickup as possible, but it's not 100% required. It's a pretty weak output, but almost any preamp can work. I haven't used a PUTW in a long time, but did just get a latest version with the Mi-Si preamp - doesn't actually appear to me to have changed over the years - waiting for me to get around to installing it somewhere and check it out.