Pickup Advice For a '71 F412

[lonesome picker]

I've got a '71 F412 that has a mini-mic pickup presently installed. I really don't like the sound. It is real "tubby" and feeds back quite easily. I've tried sound hole pickups but the pole spacing is too close together for a 12 string and you lose either the top or bottom E strings (or both).

I don't want to cut into the old girl to install a saddle pickup. The bridge already has a small crack between a couple of bridge pin holes, and I don't want to have to rout out the bridge slot to install a saddle pick up.

I'm thinking toward a bridge plate pickup. K&K makes a 3 transducer sound plate pickup that looks like it might be the ticket. I run all my acoustics through a Baggs outboard pre-amp so having an onboard pre-amp, volume and tone controls is not what I want.

Anyone out there is Guild Land use one of these pickups?

 

[laverda]

K&K is the way... have them in each of my Guilds except the D50 but only because I haven't ordered it yet
I went with a trinity system on my F415 which has the 3 transducer sound plate pickup plus an internal condenser mic all running through the outboard K&K preamp... works for me.
Cheers,
Mick

 

[charliea]

I've said it before, but I'll go ahead and say it again. Once you amplify it's all fake, anyway, so instead of worrying about the pickup, get one of the modeling devices (I have a Fishman Aura Spectrum), and you can make the amplified guitar sound like pretty much anything you want. I have an old 70's Lawrence soundhole pickup, the kind that mounts with a spring, that I can move easily from guitar to guitar. Plugged into the Fishman, it sounds just fine.

 

[MLBob]

K & K Pure mini. you can also do a blended system with the mini 3 transducer and an undersaddle piezo that will run through a K &. k blend box (stereo cable out of guitar into box). The K& K box will let you dial in the level you want from each and you can eliminate one entirely - say the piezo if you didn't need it to cut throuhgh a mix of other instruments w/o feedback at higher volume. The mini alone, however, is great too. I had the blended system installed in the Studio 24 I lucked into. I run it through the K & K box and then through a Radial PZ Pre. Couldn't be happier.