X-Bridge experts: question.

[Pietro]

I have a buddy who wants to put an X-bridge in his strat (non-Anderson, poor bugger).

He wants to do it passive like my Andersons are wired, and use it with an outboard preamp

L.R. Baggs seems to indicate you can do this no problem.

True?

[pipedwho]

You can do this with just about any passive piezo pickup.

I've installed the Graphtech Ghost pickups into an old Schecter I had. These are normally installed with a preamp and battery in the guitar. But, while I was testing, I decided to wire to the ring on the stereo jack and just ran a cable out of the guitar into an Aphex Punch Factory (which has a really high input impedance of around 10Meg ohms). There was no tonal degradation (as piezos aren't affected by cable capacitance in the same way as magnetic pickups are), and virtually no noise along a 12 foot run between the guitar and the pedal. I was impressed. Of course, I wanted to blend the magnetic and piezo signals in the guitar (which must be done with active electronics), so I installed all the Ghost electronics and routed out a battery box. All around a pretty easy install.

But, I thought I'd mention it, as the first step was to test and run it passively (into a Hi-Z pedal). I ran it like that for week with good results.

[tom]

we tried the Baggs passively, and beyond a 6 foot cable it was really dull sounding. could be that the Baggs has less output than the ghost.

[Pietro]

we tried the Baggs passively, and beyond a 6 foot cable it was really dull sounding. could be that the Baggs has less output than the ghost.

Hmmm... I wonder if they still make it the same way...

That's why all X-Bridge Andersons have a pre-amp...

[pipedwho]

we tried the Baggs passively, and beyond a 6 foot cable it was really dull sounding. could be that the Baggs has less output than the ghost.
I've never used an X-Bridge before, but the Ghost is a pretty typical piezo pickup with a pretty typical output. It's possible the X-Bridge has a really low output by comparison, but the output level shouldn't really affect the tonality. Maybe the piezo material used in the X-Bridge also has a large resistive component due to material properties or geometry - which could cause the high end to roll off, and probably also manifest as a reduction in output level.

Cable capacitance of around 500pF will reduce the output level of a typical piezo (as per my Ghost TOM bridge), but it should happen fairly evenly, unlike an inductive pickup where the extra load capacitance changes the resonant frequency and noticeably rolls off a lot of high end.

I've only ever done this with a bunch of acoustic UST and SBT piezos from Graphtech, Takamine, K&K and some other small brands that I can't remember. I normally put between about 500pf and 2nF across the piezo output reducing the output level to avoid overdriving a preamp - with negligible effect on the tone.