Pickups
There are many opinions among guitarists about pickups. Here are
mine:
I have never met a pickup that I loved. Every one that I have ever
heard adds some distortion or artifacts to the sound of an acoustic
guitar. I particularly dislike the distortion that comes with
under-saddle pickups. For me, a good microphone placed a few inches
from the guitar captures the sound of a guitar more accurately than any
pickup. That said, there are situations where a microphone just won't work
well for a guitar on stage. My research on pickups has led me to
brands of bridgeplate pickups that I think do as well as can be done to
accurately capture the sound of a guitar, the McIntyre Feather
and the K&K
Pure Mini. Neither changes the sound of the instrument when it
is unplugged. Neither interferes with the critical joint between the
saddle and the bridge. In order to service my customers who need
pickups, I have become a K&K dealer. I sell the K&K Pure
Mini installed for $150. With about a week's lead time, I can get
any of the K&K products that you may need, although if you need it
faster and plan to install it yourself, you may wish to use
Amazon.com.
My wife and I ran a venue, The Fredericksburg Songwriters' Showcase, for
20 years. My experience there leads me to this advice:
Keep the electronics in the guitar as simple as you can!
Failures on stage are very inconvenient. Dead batteries that require
slacking the strings to change are very inconvenient. If you need a
preamp or any controls for the pickup, put them in a box outside the
guitar, either on your belt or on the floor. An external box is easy
to bypass or swap and the gig can go on.
An easy way to get the flexibility of a pickup, for moving around on
stage, and the sound of a mic'ed guitar is to put a microphone on a stand
in front of your guitar and use both the microphone and the pickup.
The audience will hear the fullness and shimmer of the guitar when you are
close to the mic. They will still hear the guitar through the pickup
when you move away from the mic, but they will remember the fullness that
they heard before and think that they still hear it even though you may
have moved away for a few seconds. And, it is simple and limits the
equipment you need in your guitar. Remember: keep it simple.
|
