School me on piezo setups

[Bidley]

So I'm looking at buying a bass for home recordings. As it's just for mucking about with at home, I quite fancied putting a piezo bridge in it. I understand you need a preamp for this too. How would one wire this up? I've been looking at the Axesrus systems, which of those would I need and what are the pros/cons of them?

I'm a complete noob with this, so be as patronising as you like (I also know all these bits are very cheap and not tip top gear).

[ICBM]

Don't.

Piezos are nasty-sounding unreliable things which need hiss-generating unreliable battery-eating things to operate properly. Too much complexity in pursuit of too little useful tone. And that's even the good ones...

Patronising enough?

[Bidley]

Righto, I'll save my money then!

[ICBM]

To be non-patronising, you'd be better to spend your money on a nice offboard preamp. I don't believe there's a good electric bass tone that's been discovered yet that can't be produced by a standard passive bass and one of those... and you can easily upgrade the bass later and keep the unit.

I have to admit that I'm unusual in that I think the same about all instruments really, including electro-acoustics. Just seen too many problems with piezos and active electronics in general, and never really heard a great tone from any of them.

[pintspiller]

i'd thought of getting the piezo version of schaller 455 for my gordon-smith, but might just get an ac-2 instead

[octatonic]

Don't worry your pretty little head about it, sweet-cheeks.

[MrFoxen]

To make piezos sound good, you need to have a really high impedance on them, Super hard on type buffers do it, but best I've found all round is the Sansamp Paradriver. all the scratchy nasty that goes on is sorted by the high impedance, but you can still get a lot of string noise and noise from the body you might not be used to from magnetics, because you've basically rendered your entire bass microphonic. I learned a lot about making piezos sound good on the Octobass project, scratchyness is a pretty big deal when you are bowing roundwound strings: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leadtowill/7610407178/