Installed the K&K unit for spider bridge resonator today and thought I’d give my impressions.
The unit mounts on the underside of the cone, on the screw that secures the spider to the cone. It needs to touch the cone and yet be free to wiggle a bit or mucho feedback is the result. Here it is in situ:
The unit does work, but here’s what stood out for me:
1. Plastic output jack. I was surprised to see this when I opened the box. It’s a pretty cheap looking unit. The exterior hex nut / flange is also soft black plastic and I wasn’t willing to use a normal wrench to tighten it. Looks low-budget. Disappointing from K&K not to just use a standard metal jack. No way this jack stands up to serious gigging. I’ve already told my customer to bring it back for a real jack gratis when this one fails. I give it six months tops. Immediately after this job, I installed a K&K Pure Mini in a different guitar - those familiar will know that in comparison, everything about the Mini’s jack is robust and classy.
2. Fixing system. The transducer is held by two nuts separated by an ill-fitting spring as a kludgy locking device. The spring provided is really too wide for the application and wants to pop off the tiny nuts. The install depends on the nuts being at a very specific tightness (really, a specific looseness…) so if spring tension is lost in this manner the nuts spin freely and this is catastrophic to the install. And the owner isn’t going to be able to troubleshoot it backstage in the dark when it’s buried under the tailpiece, the cover and it’s zillion tiny screws etc. Dumb.
I ended up replacing their spring with a cut down pickup-height spring which is much better. Again, really sloppy design and nothing like other K&K products I’ve installed.
3. Finnicky-ness of install. The nuts need to be tightened so the transducer is in contact with the cone but still able to wiggle. A smear of grease is placed between cone and transducer to cut down on extraneous noise caused by the wiggle. Nuts any tighter equals howling feedback, any looser and the tone really suffers. The difference between a good tension and bad is about 1/4 turn of those 1/8” nuts …. Suffice to say, you will be unscrewing the tailpiece, removing the cone, make a change, reassembling, tuning to pitch and testing many times as you make adjustments to sneak up on a good setting. You will also be praying the ad-hoc nut-spring-nut rig doesn’t back itself off a little from the perfect setting you found over time as the instrument is bumped around car trunks etc in its travels.
Once in and correctly set, the unit sounds good and captures the metallic reso tone well, but it’s highly sensitive - probably too sensitive. A minute, practically inaudible G-string buzz became the deafening roar of a thousand angry hornets once the unit was installed - louder than any actually note plucked - and so some fret plane remediation was required - my client runs his resos at low action and plays finger style piedmont blues, no slide. This unit is probably more suited to high action slide playing. I predict this unit may give trouble during seasonal changes if the truss rod is not kept perfectly adjusted and little buzzed develop. The K&K has no tolerance for the rattles and squeaks common to some resonators.
Overall, sounds good, cheap components, doesn’t strike me as a robust solution for a pro musician, unlike K&Ks other units. If tackling an install, allow for the extra fiddling required when bidding the job. I would budget double the time vs a K&K Pure Mini install plus inform customer about possibility of fretwork or at least setup work as an additional unavoidable cost. So this is potentially an expensive install on some instruments.
Despite the nice sound, I won’t recommend this unit to customers going forward because chances seem good that any reso you put this in will come back …
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