Best Budget Pickup ????

[kaos]

Originally Posted by wildbill1962

WOW Thanks for all of the GREAT advice and wisdom. I tried the JJB a few years ago and the one I received had a lot of hum, so I pulled it out.
They have prob improved their system, or I could have just received a bad one. I think I will give them another try

Thanks again everyone !!!!!!!!

Bill

You may have had a bad transducer or an install issue. It may have been low end feedback which is common with both K&K and JJB. A $7 planet waves sound hole cover helps a lot!

In any event, with JJB issues, send Jessie and email, he is very helpful and will work with you to get your problem resolved.

Bob.

[Marek]

Hi,

I add to consideration BGM Elevation pickup as cheaper alternative to K&K:
http://www.bgmelectronics.com/index.html

I had installed JJB 330 in Art&Lutherie Dread and BGM E-3 in two other (Furch OM and Custom Dread).
For me BGM worked better - better cable quality (light Mogami cables) and better sound quality (however considering that these were 3 different guitars with cedar tops, I'm careful to judge).

Regards,
Marek

[MrErikJ]

Here's another for JJB. Great pickup for a great price but you will need a 1 megaohm input impedence preamp, so either buy one by K&K or JJB. It'll be muddy with another brand's (like Baggs or Fishman) preamp. So, 50 bucks for the pickup and 100-150 bucks for a preamp. Even with install, this is a pretty cost effective way to get pretty good live sound.

If output and feedback resistance is important, the Baggs LB6 only costs a little more (about 85 bucks), is passive, high-output, feedback resistant, and has less quack than the standard undersaddle pickup. It's been around forever and still outshines a lot of the competition. It's almost purely a string sensor, so it's not as natural as the JJB, but it sounds pretty clean and will work in almost any setting. However, it requires a little more effort to install as the pickup is built into a saddle and your guitar's bridge will have to be widened slightly to accommodate the replacement saddle. But if you play loud, this is a passive pickup with enough output you can run it straight to a DI box into the board or into an amp with no other gear and get by. I have one installed in a dread and I blend it with a soundboard transducer to get a more natural sound, but the reason I chose it is for scenarios in in which everything goes wrong, the LB6 will always work fine.

[slide496]

Another vote for Bill Lawrence

[Mandobart]

Originally Posted by MrErikJ

Here's another for JJB. Great pickup for a great price but you will need a 1 megaohm input impedence preamp, so either buy one by K&K or JJB. It'll be muddy with another brand's (like Baggs or Fishman) preamp. So, 50 bucks for the pickup and 100-150 bucks for a preamp. Even with install, this is a pretty cost effective way to get pretty good live sound.

My experience with preamps is different. K&K and JJB have certainly not cornered the market on impedance matching devices for Piezo pu's. I got a decent sound out of an ART Tube preamp with K&K and JJB pu's. I got better sound out of the same pu's with the Behringer ADI21. When I got the K&K pure preamp the sound wasn't any better but is was a smaller, more convenient package. Now I use a Redeye and it is the best sounding preamp yet that I've used with a PA. When I plug into my Carvin AG300 with the HI Z engaged I can go without any preamp and it sounds just as good.

[tdq]

I've just been experimenting with the el-cheapo piezo's I bought - 3 discs to a jack, $10- just trying various places on the outside of my guitars (flat-top, weissenborn, archtop) and I'm actually pretty **** impressed. I'm running through an cheap EQ V-Tone acoustic ADI 21 I got off gumtree. The archtop needed the most tweaking but flat eq wasn't too bad on the others, a bit of fiddling made it better. I might just buy another couple of sets and do a more permanent install on each instrument. An upgrade isl still be on the cards eventually but I may invest in a better EQ pedal first.

[jonfields45]

My standard post on this subject and you can tell I'm no cork sniffer :~)...

In the opinion of this retired electrical engineer high quality piezo disks are so cheap at the major electronic distributors that you might make your purchase more based on which distributor has the cheapest shipping. Soldering and encapsulation is an easy do-it-yourself task and the only place you could cheap out and regret it is the output jack, though we're still talking ~$10 for a genuine Switchcraft.

You could buy all the parts and a rich selection of disks for $25 bucks and the only downside would be trying them out to see which ones you like. Then you too could be in the pickup business! One man's muddy is another's rich and you could feed an obsession with higher output if that's your cup of tea.

[fazool]

I tried a have a Dimarzio Dp134 I am very happy with - I tried a Dean Markley and didn't like it. The Dimarzio is excellent and lists for $89 so you can find one on sale or used for about your price point.