The Acoustic Guitar Forum

It appears I've been summoned.....I'm glad you found the more recent clip on YouTube, and not the one from 1981 where I have a big red handlebar mustache and look like Yosemite Sam in a three piece suit....

The pickups I use on most of my performance dulcimers these days are made by LR Baggs. They're basically a scaled-down version of the Baggs LB6 pickup, with a brass piece containing piezo elements underneath a Graphtech/Tusq saddle that's integral to the pickup. The one that's on the dulcimer I was playing in that clip is actually the first prototype Lloyd made. It was sent to me in 1985 to test out, and it's worked so well I've used it ever since. (I've since put production versions on several other dulcimers.)

Prior to getting that pickup I used a number of different pickups, sometimes in combination, sometimes by themselves, but always while using an instrument mic at the same time. In the 1981 clip I think the dulcimer I was using would have had a Shadow pickup on it.

If you look carefully at the dulcimer in the 2017 clip you'll notice that there are a couple of light-colored circles of wood just to the right of where the cord plugs in: those were where volume and tone controls for the previous pickup system I had in the dulcimer were mounted. It's been so long I don't even remember what was in there, but it probably had a Shadow pickup under the top and a Barcus Berry Super Dot directly under the saddle.

The Baggs pickup sounded so much better that I had the Super Dot yanked out, but the Shadow might still be glued to the underside of the top, even though it's been more than thirty years since it's been used. But as I recall my repairman warned me that we might damage the top if we pulled it off, since it was epoxied on there. So we just left it in place.

It took me a long time to come around to putting a pickup in any of my guitars, but I've used pickups on dulcimers from the very beginning. They're just very difficult instruments to mic accurately, and if you move around as you play you can't keep a consistent tone. So using a pickup in conjunction with an instrument mic allows me to get a good stage sound without having to stand stock still. This way I give the folks running the soundboard a good solid signal they can use, while giving myself the dynamic control of being able to walk up to and back off the mic when musically desirable.

My first mountain dulcimer, which has a different fingerboard width than the Blue Lion dulcimer I'm using in this recent clip, currently has a single K&K round transducer on the top at the lower bout. After years of experimentation with pickup placement, that spot seems to be the best for getting the fullest low end response as well as the trebles.

So my recommendation for dulcimer pickups is either get one of the Baggs integral bridge pickups if you have either a Blue Lion or a McSpadden dulcimer (Baggs makes them for both fretboard/saddle widths) or else get a K&K transducer if your dulcimer doesn't conform to the Blue Lion or McSpadden dimensions.

Hope that makes sense.

Wade Hampton Miller