Keira WitherKay wrote
yep . this weekend i decided to for go the mic ..the gig was small enough to be mic'd tho and i had performed there the previous week with the mic'd up guitar.......... and decided to use the LR baggs i just installed ...a test so to speak in gig enviroment......... and yes i'm still happy with the system... (see exactly what it is above) but i found the sound to be very sterile when compared to the mic'd sound....
I think there's two parts to that
1) The pickups are sometimes TOO good, too hi-fidelic. So much so that they don't sound real to human ears.
2) THe pickups are too close to the action. So in fact they probably do sound real as in they sound the way the guitar would sound if your ear were about 1 micron away from the bridge (IE to all practical intents and purposes they DO NOT sound real).
Maybe a little reverb would help?
another interesting test was done when i tested my LR baggs installation in store just after they installed it ....and i complained that the pick up was not sounding the same as the guitar unplugged......... and the salesman said that in his opinion any pick up system in a classical guitar makes even the best instruments with awesome acoustic tone ...sound much the same as all other mid priced instruments.............. and he proved it by fetching a takamine with valve preamp and costing close to R20 000 and it too sounded the much the same plugged in as a yamaha cgx's for R9 000 he then played ..... yet acoustically they were streets apart with tone....sad very sad ,,,,,,,, and a situation i hope changes soon ..........
I don't know if this is true for ALL types of acoustic guitar pickup, but certainly with the undersaddle type of pickup the differences between guitars tend to be reduced. My Smoothtalker and my Morgan sound different plugged in, but not as different as they do when they're unplugged.
