Sound Checker's ACCU_STIC has nothing to do with the company's other pickups.
It's a rather ingenous idea: a small microphone with a preamp and battery - all mounted in one compact unit ready to fit into your guitar.It seems like an extremely good idea, and I was very excited when I was to try it. I have rarely been more disappointed. It sounded horribleat first!!! A narrow, tincan-like sound with lots and lots of feedback even at extremely low levels. The microphone is just a cheap one and the preamp doesn't seem to offer any compensation for its narrow and unsuitable frequency curve. Sound Checker's demo mp3 is quite impressive though, so I decided to fiddle a bit with the tone controls on the mixer. After a while I was able to dial up a relatively decent sound, but not really good enough to make it a serious alternative, and besides extreme tone control settings isn't what I'm looking for anyway. Trying out different positionings of the microphone did give some rather interesting results though. I still haven't found anything on any instrument I actually can use, but I'm definitely not finished yet!
But then...Before I tried repositioning for real, I chucked it into my L. R. Baggs-euqipped Seagull to see how it worked in combination with a piezo-transducers. Glody Be!!!Combining the ACCU_STIC with the built-in bridge transducer gave me exactly the realistic-but-loud sound I've been looking for for ages! Further tests with other instruments and piezo-transducers confirmed this unexpected turn of events. The ACCU_STIC may sound like crap on its own, but it's exactly what you need to get rid of that synthetic edge vistually all piezeo-transducers struggle with. So if you want to improve the sound quality of a guitar that already has a pickup, ACCU_STIC is probably the soundest (pardon the pun) investment you can do! I've tried this pickup on these instruments: Back to index
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