Archtop Pickup Options for a Natural Acoustic Tone?

[dc.]

I am interested in hearing about pickup options for achieving a natural acoustic tone from an archtop guitar. Magnetic pickups are great but I would like to learn more about the other types of pickups that are available these days.

I have a Kinman noiseless P90 magnetic pickup installed in my fully-hollow Eastman archtop. Since the guitar has a beautiful acoustic tone, I also like to amplify the guitar using a microphone. I blend the two sources together or switch back and forth between the two. I have come to prefer dual source systems like this since installing them on my acoustic guitars, and the result is just as pleasing on my archtop. The Kinman magnetic pickup sounds great; it's my favourite magnetic pickup that I've tried to date, but I find that I like the sound of the guitar through the microphone just as much. It's also fun to record a rhythm track on a looper pedal with the mic and then solo over it with the magnetic pickup (or visa versa). I get great results by using FX on the magnetic pickup and blending that with the clean acoustic sound.

After using this sort of setup for some time, I find I really miss the microphone when I don't have it, but the mic is a pain in the neck to deal with in general and feedback is always a concern. I'm hoping to find a natural sounding pickup that I can use as a suitable replacement for the microphone. I'm looking for a practical plug-and-play alternative. Ideally, I would like to wire the magnetic pickup and acoustic pickup to a stereo endpin jack for the sake of convenience and simplicity.

Thanks!

[James May]

Well, there haven't been many options. But after some significant design work, I can now say that using an Ultra Tonic is one approach to consider.

In the below thread I show how I mounted my Ultra Tonic in a seriously good sounding carved archtop, the Eastman AR610CE. It was also an experiment to show that a passive blending scheme was possible between a mag and the Ultra Tonic.

https://www.acousticguitarforum.com/...d.php?t=593356 see post #7

Since then, I've replaced the mag pickup with a Kent Armstrong humbucker with 12 adjustable pole pieces. This allowed me to perfect the string balance with D'Addario nickel bronze strings which I really like.

I made a quick demo clip of the range of voices possible with this setup.
• First half is with ToneDexter on BYPASS, so no processing - straight into soundcard.
• 2nd half is exact same sequence but going through the WaveMap created with the Ultra Tonic
• There is an additional bit at the end showing fingerpicking with Ultra Tonic through WaveMap.