How a Guitar Bridge Works

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Jim Dufrensne, I'm here to tell you about acoustic guitar amplification. Now this uses a piezo crystal strip that fits under the saddle. There's another kind of guitar pick up that I favor. It's made by B Band, a company in Finland, and it works off of a slightly different principle, it has a condenser ribbon, and this ribbon is as thin as a piece of paper. Now when you install these piezo electric pick ups, you usually have to modify the guitar slightly. You have to make the sure the bottom of the bridge slide is flat and you have to remove material either from the bottom of this bridge slide or you have to take some off the saddle itself, or a combination of the two, and it takes a little finesse to make the parts fit together. The B Band system is as thin as a piece of paper, and normally doesn't require any modification whatsoever. And it's my thought that the B Band system sounds much more accurate. Now this is a piezo electric system and it has a little bit of a quackiness to it, and that's, until B Band came along they all had that. Gibson makes a real nice system which uses piezo electric crystals and their Chet Adkins, I had one of those guitars. It sounds pretty darn good. And Ovation was a pioneer in guitar amplification. They had a really really good system, but they were still piezo electric, and you could still hear that quack if you listen to it. The quack is right there as the notes start. Now you can hear that quackiness a little bit, especially with the full chord. Now with this equalizer, you can change the sounds. Here's full bass. Here's mid range. And that one really accentuates the quickness. Let's try the treble, and one called presence."