Fishman Rare earth pickup solution?

chap

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 3:11 pm Post subject:

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I emailed Fishman and got what was originallya discouraging response. Here is the correspondence:


My Original enquiry:

Gypsy Jazz size

Comments:
Please make a rare earth blend pickup that will fit a Selmer style
guitar. There is a huge untapped market. Every gypsy Jazzer I know
(and there are a huge and growing number of us) is unsatisfied with the
pickups available to us. Horrid Piezo nonsense. Seriously-- I love my rare earth in my Martin. No better pickup on the market. Please do not make me cut this damned guitar! You will make a fortune.

His response:

Not only do all you Django types play cool music, but you must be the
most vocal subsection of musicians on the planet. Unfortunately, the
economies of scale would make a Rare Earth for your petite Sel-Mac
soundhole cost 7 times the price of a normal pickup. We just couldn't
sell enough of them to make it work, I'm afraid. I've already asked.
We've long since discontinued the left handed models, for example, for
the same reason, and I'm afraid demand for those pickups, at its lowest,
was still considerably more than all of the specialty requests that we
get(Selmacs, bajo sextos, Puerto Rican Cuatro) combined. So, I'm sorry,
we aren't ever going to have a RE for your guitar, but keep playing the
great music. Several people have written to tell me they squeezed a
Rare Earth into their grand bouche models, so hope is not lost!

Best Regards,

Frank P.

Fishman Customer Relations/

Customer Service Representative

340 Fordham Road

Wilmington MA

01887

[url=http://www.fishman.com]www.fishman.com[/url]

[url=http://www.fishmanaura.com]www.fishmanaura.com[/url]

Here is my followup:

Fair enough--but how about this which I feel would be very marketable--You sell a line of just the condenser mic part of the RE. No resizing necessary. You could market it to every one of the markets you mention plus the lefties. Here's the way to make it really work though--you have to adapt the connection so that it works as an easy add-on to say a D'armond, Stimer or some such existing mag pickup. It would just be combining existing technology that you already sell in a slightly different way to pick up tons of new sales and it would cost less.

End

Now of course I am not going to cut my guitar, but I really think there is potential for marketing this rare earth condenser in a way that combines the "blend" aspect of the existing RE pickup with other pickups that we currently use. Hell, if they don't do it, it may be time to go to radioshack and do it ourselves. I have considered just picking up that Favino model 1B that has been on Jacques's site for some time now. The RE would definitely fit in that!

Update:

Got another reply from Frank in which he says that they actually do sell the mic separately (although I cannot find this product on the site). Here is his reply:

Hi again Jerome. Well, that product already exists, basically. We sell the modified crown mic used with our blender systems. We have a brace clamping mount for the microphone as well. You can run this microphone out of the guitar with whatever magnetic pickup you choose using a stereo jack. Then you could use a Blender mixer or Fishman amplifier to combine the two signals and provide power to the microphone.


Now that might be a workable setup--Stimer and an on-board condenser into a blender.

Update#2

Here is Frank's response about the availability of the mic:

The items aren’t on a product page; they’re sneaky and hidden.

I’ll attach a product sheet for the item I’m talking about.



The crown microphone has a list price of $199.95 and could be special ordered from any Fishman dealer. The part number is

ACC-BLE-MIC. If you purchased the microphone, you could wire it to the ring terminal of any stereo endpin jack and wire your magnetic pickup to the tip. If you plugged in a standard instrument cable to the guitar, you would get just the mag pickup. If you plugged in a stereo cable you could run to a blending mixer. There are still companies making such mixers, although our discontinued one is still in a lot of stores (Fishman Pocket Blender). Our current amplifiers with multiple input channels (Loudbox 100, Loudbox Performer) both can take a stereo input and have a switch to send phantom power to a ring terminal microphone. Both of those amps are on our product page. If you order the mic, just let me know, and I’ll ship you a couple of different mounting options (one alligator brace clip and one adhesive gooseneck clip) for the mic inside of the guitar.

See product page pdf file

frater

I just managed to fit a Rare Earth on a D 500 and it looks good: the pickup itself is D shaped , I never noticed that! Well, it sounds just great especially if I pass it through my trusty Passac pre-amp: it really respects the acoustic sound of the guitar... It's a shame one can't use one of these on a oval hole!