Acoustic guitars played live, either solo or in a band, can sound beautiful. However, getting the sound just right can be fraught with difficulties.
Acoustic guitars for live performance have come a long way, many now have on-board pre amps and EQ’s to help performers. The problems occur when you have a guitar that doesn’t have any built in electrics. There are a ways to overcome this. The most straightforward is the old fashioned method of using a microphone on a stand in front the guitar. The problem with this is that you can’t move around the stage and have to stay in one spot in front of the mic. It works, but not always the most practical.
You can fit removable pickups to your instrument. This can be done two ways. The first is with a pickup that fits under the strings in the sound hole. They have either a decent length cable with a 1/4″ jack on one end hard wired to the pickup, or a small lead with an actual jack socket fitted that can either be permanently fitted to the guitar where the strap button goes or secured to the body with a blutak type adhesive. This then allows you to use any of your guitar leads to plug into it. They sound great and can be removed when your not needing to be plugged in.
The second type of removable pickups are the transducer pickups. These come with either single or twin small discs that are the mics and a small lead with a jack socket attached that again can be attached the same as the sound hole pickup. They can be fitted anywhere on the inside or the outside of the body of the guitar with the blutak type adhesive. Although there is no control over the volume of the output, the EQ is determined by where you attach the pickups to the instrument, letting you fully customise the sound you want. These can again be removed when the instrument isn’t needed to be plugged in. These types of pickup allow your beautiful sounding fully acoustic guitar to be played live and heard at volume.
Roberts Instrument Repairs and Accessories 