Katayama Guitar ｜ Developing innovative Electric Acoustic Guitar

Because a conventional pickup is placed under the saddle and enclosed inside the bridge, the reproduced sound is affected by the strings’ vibration and echoes inside the body of the guitar. As with the USPU, the SMPU uses the tension of the strings to fix the pickup device, however, as it is attached to the surface, it mainly picks up the sound character the guitar creates outside the body. Also there is only a minimal time lag between the natural sound and the reproduced sound.

You can’t avoid adjusting the saddle, so simply changing strings can cause a contact failure within USPU devices. This problem rarely occurs with the SMPU system.

Conventional pickup devices are placed under one saddle (sometimes divided into two pieces) so that the 6 strings are touching 6 pickup elements separately. This causes the saddle to be pulled forward by the tension of the strings, making the supporting surface less stable and results in a poorer quality of reproduced sounds. The SMPU system allows it to gain a good volume balance corresponding to each string, and replicates the sound of an acoustic guitar.