A Little Pick Me Up

Michael Watts explores solutions to the challenge of amplifying acoustic guitars over the decades - are we nearly there yet?

- Michael Watts

The first time I had a pickup fitted to an acoustic guitar was a disaster. I didn't know any better. It was an instrument that I loved and I had been looking forward to an amp'd up version of its voice, maybe a splash of reverb, some delay - keeping it tasteful, of course. Instead, what I got was the malignantly ugly quack and logarithmic anti-dynamic range of a primitive under-saddle pickup. Marvellous.

Upon discovering that the installation had also affected the acoustic sound, I ripped it out with my bare hands and vowed never again. It was at that moment that I joined the legions of acoustic guitarists searching for a workable, musical plugged-in sound.

I recognise that some readers will be hoping for hard and fast answers to this puzzle. I don't believe there are any - I've looked. There are no shortcuts, either - I've looked there, too. What I can offer is some advice from my own experience and that of other guitarists I have spoken with.

Prior to the one-two punch of Tracy Chapman's debut album and Eric Clapton's MTV unplugged, the acoustic guitar had languished in the hair-metal doldrums for years, consigned to duty as a laminated stage prop to be wheeled out for the erogenous moments, and sadly not everyone was writing ballads of the calibre of Extreme's More Than Words or Mr Big's To Be With You (that Paul Gilbert solo remains a sublime masterclass).

A common element of the above examples is a distinct lack of the plastic piezo ping that children of the 90s had learned to accept as inevitable. Instead, these recordings have a natural sound - actual air molecules being shifted by a braced wooden soundboard. Just delicious.