Arjun Menon wrote
Yup, i meant an electric amp.
Well the biggest limitation with a guitar amp and acoustic is the speakers, which only reproduce up to 4kHz before rapidly falling off. It still works, but you lose a lot of the "sparkle" and "sheen" of an acoustic. Especially for blended electric/piezo sounds, that's limiting as you effectively limit both sounds to the same frequency range.
Interesting you mention valves ironing out the transition. What do you do for headroom? DI?
Transients, not transition ? Piezos respond to the note transient (the initial attack) faster than any other transducer, so accentuate it a bit. Add to that the fact that they have a much wider dynamic range (because they don't have the inertia of an acoustic guitar's top) and you end up with a heck of a volume spike on the attack. When either the guitar's preamp or the amps input stage doesn't have the headroom to cope with that transient spike, it clips, and that distortion adds to and helps define what we think of as piezo "quack".
Electronic compression/limiting can't help, because you'd need an attack and decay time in the order of a couple of microseconds to clamp down on the transient (software limiters sometimes can if they use "look ahead" transient detection, but you can't use that in realtime without introducing a delay).
Valves clip too, but have a very musical "soft clipping" which is much more pleasing to the ear (as we guitaristas know full well ?). You need a proper valve input stage to get any benefit from the valve though - most cheaper "valve" preamps use a solid-state buffer circuit first and then only pass the (probably already distorted) signal through the valve.
Also note that with the Graph Tech saddles, it's less of a problem to start with, as the transducer is embedded fairly deeply in the saddle and the saddle material itself seems to have a bit of a natural limiting effect, taming the transient before the piezo sees it.
