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 $160. 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.
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