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When I'm not building guitars, I do live sound at the theatres around DC.
I've had the opportunity to hear a variety of pickups in as professional a
sound system as there is in the Metro area -- Strathmore Hall with a d&b
Q1 line array, D12 amps, Midas console and the like.
I really like the K&K pickups, but there is a caveat that applies not only to
the Pure Western Mini, but the McIntyre Feather, PUTW and other
soundboard transducers: more than any other type of pickup, they turn
the soundboard into a large diaphragm microphone. It is for this very
reason that they can be highly susceptible to bass response as well as and
more importantly to feedback.
All these pickups are professional tools, but the industry has a bad habit
of marketing them, generally to amateur and pro-sumer applications. If
your set-up consists of a "acoustic" guitar amp on stage that functions as
a stage monitor as well as the main, you're going to have problems. If
you like your stage loud, you're going to have more problems. Period.
Professional systems have separate amps, speakers, and equalization for
FOH as well for monitors, that way they can provide separate EQ to
address feedback that originates on the stage without removing those
frequency bands from the mains. The biggest problem I run into both as
an engineer as well as a builder who installs pickups is the client who
pays for a professional pickup but the rest of his signal chain isn't even
close to professional.
Solo guitarists and your average singer/songwriter with modest stage
levels can have a stage sound that is very natural and can, with the use of
appropriate equipment, have pickups like the K&K that have a very
natural sound. All of these soundboard pickups do still have a slightly
metallic edge to them, but they do not have the snap that a UST has. On
the other hand they don't have the punch either. The D-Tar, with its
18volt system provides enough headroom to get much of the brittleness
out of the way. It's not as fully natural a pickup as the K&K, but its far
superior for its general presentation as well as its feedback rejection in
moderate to high SPL applications.
If you're playing in a band situation, I wouldn't usually recommend a SBT
because of both the issues of feedback from the monitor system --
bands tend to want higher stage levels which are problematic for a SBT.
The other issue is that our ears hear at best when we're really young,
20hz - 20khz -- but only once. We don't hear that frequency band for
every instrument in the band, every input. We have to share. If you mix
an acoustic guitar to sound "natural" in a full band situation, it'll get lost
in the mix -- it won't have any definition because its sharing all the low
frequencies with the rhythm section. Most of the low end should get
rolled off to make room for the bass, drums, and piano if there is one.
That leaves the midrange and highs to be the principle band of
information for a guitar. We may not like the sound of a UST as a signal
source because of their natural brittleness, although the various
modelling takes care of some of this, but the cut that a UST provides,
along with excellent feedback rejection make it a better choice for a band
situation the likes of CSN, Dixie Chicks, and so on.
The K&K is a wonderful pickup, in the right application, and used with at
the very least an inline fully parametric eq or 30 band eq to control
misbehaving frequencies before they get amplified. Another good choice
is the Shure dfr22, a DSP unit that generates micro parametric filters on
misbehaving frequencies as they happen to control and stabilize the
signal.
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