Shocked, Acoustic Guitar with Batteries!

Acoustic Guitar Has Batteries, That Is True

For most of time, acoustic guitar uses pickups requires batteries to be as the power source. That is because acoustic folk guitar creates weaker signal which requires a preamp to boost the signal. And the preamp often requires 9V battery as power source.

You may have noticed the word “often”. Yes, the acoustic guitar doesn’t require battery all the time just like electric guitar is not always without battery. It depends on how the guitar converts the energy into a signal to send to the amp.

So, we’d like to swim in the pool of amplifier firstly for a while.

Why Acoustic Guitar Requires Batteries?

Well, in early times, acoustic guitar needs to amplify their tone in front of a microphone on a stand. This works fine when make a recording, but it is a different story when on a live concert performance.

Bsides, the microphone limits the gestures of the player. And the player needs to keep a certain distance with the microphone to achieve the best volume performance or there is feedback.

So, people need a better solution. And there is a pickup.

Pickups are transducers who transmit types of signals into sound. There are various types of pickups, but all of them belong to one of the three types: magnetic, internal microphone and contact pickup.

Magnetic pickup detects the vibration of strings. Active pickup is to boost the signal with a power source. Passive pickups are more common, but they don’t need power source. Thus, this is why some electric guitar need batteries, and some acoustic guitars don’t need. It depends on which type of magnetic pickup be used.

Internal microphone is also a type of transducers. It detects the waves of sound instead of vibration of strings to produce the signal. Like microphone on the stand, this type of pickup is also a type interference. And it also requires the addition of preamp.

Contact pickup detects the change of pressure. Piezo pickups are the most common one. This type of pickups is often mounted under the saddles. It detects the changes of pressure of soundboard. Also, it has to work with other devices like amplifier to boost the signal. Thus, batteries are essential.

Summary

There should not be an argument for if batteries are good or not for acoustic guitars. We just try to explain why there are batteries in acoustic guitars and even electric guitars.

If batteries are essential or not, depends on the types of pickups you are using. And now we know there are pickups, and most of time different pickups are often combined on the same acoustic type of guitar, thus, most likely, we will find batteries. This is no big deal since the sound is right and beautiful.

To equip electric devices on classical guitars is not normal, but this type of classical acoustic guitars is also found some time for some purpose. However, if you are playing classical guitar for classical music performance, we should say that no one expect any electric effect from that classical guitar.