Hello, I am having a custom electric violin made, but because this is a pickup question, I thought I might ask here as well. It will have an internal piezo bridge pickup and potentially a magnetic pickup. I met with a family friend who makes custom guitar and bass magnetic coil pickups about making me a custom mag pickup.
His concern about having a magnetic coil pickup in addition to the bridge pickup is that the magnetic pickup will hinder the sound from the bridge pickup. Essentially he say that because the bridge pickup has a high impedance while the magnetic pickup has a low impedance, the magnetic pickup *might* ruin the sound of the bridge pickup. He is wondering if we’d lose/ruin the sound/signal from the bridge pickup.
So, I thought this would be a good place to refer to. Magnetic pickups on a violin are not common, but are on mandolins! Does anyone here have any experience with mixing a magnetic coil pickup and a bridge pickup on their mandolin (hollow, semi-hollow, or solid)? If so, what were the results?
Here are two diagrams. The second drawing is the potential plan B (onboard preamp), but I would like to avoid that. If push comes to shove, I will probably just not switch to the middle switch position, where both the mag pup signal and bridge pup signals are mixed (or just not even solder anything to the third terminal of the switch).
Thank you for your help and advice!
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