One of the important things with violin pickups is to make sure the output of your pickup or electric violin matches that of where your signal is going in. This is critical to capturing the richness of your violin and not just a shrill, tinny, top end sound. This is referred to as the impedance and impedance match of the output of the violin pickup to the input of your amplifier.
Put simply to use water as an analogy, if you have a fire hose of water as an output signal and you try to catch that with a small straw…you are missing out on most of the water err.. signal. The output impedance of piezo electric pickups is extraordinarily high in the mega Ohms, where as the input impedance to most amplifiers 9particularly for guitars and pianos) are in the Kilo-Ohms, thats of the order of 100x less. As a result the output of piezoelectric transducers tends to favour the very high frequency signals and a shrill tinny signal is often the result.
As a general rule of thumb you want you next device in your signal chain to have an input impedance of 1MOhms. You will only find this out in the specifications section of the amplifies manual, right in the back in small print. Most guitar apps and pedals are expecting something with 50Ohms which is way to small. A pre-amplification stage here is important (though the violins with built in preamps like in the Hidersine electric violins resolve this for you).
The sound of an electric violin has a tendency to be a bit thin, as it doesn’t have the acoustic shaping of a body. To resolve this effects like delay and reverb (often built into a mixing desk) can be applied there, or through the purchase of multi pedals or individual pedals.
If this all sounds a bit technical, drop by and discuss your needs and we can see what will work for you!
Popular goto solutions includes a preamp or a multi pedal. Ensure they are suitable for acoustic guitar (which have pickups) and double check the specifications.
This inexpensive pedal ($80) does it all in one. preamp, sound shaping and EQ. i don’t sell them, try DJcity
For more sophisticated offerings I like the Boss multipedals ($$$), the Zoom A1x ($)
As a personal Amp I like the aroma battery powered 25W module, it also has built in reverb (and a line out), so you can use it as personal foldback and send a line out to the big mixing desk too and use one for what I do
I can supply the Baggs preamp products and Aroma Amps otherwise you favourite guitar shop is the place to go, or try DJcity (near me)
