Artec HT-TBL

This is the Artec Triblend pickup - an active preamp with three-band EQ, with a mixer for a single-coil electro-magnetic pickup, a standard Artec piezo-electric pickup and a condenser mic mounted inside the guitar, just under the strings.

It features a dual output - a standard jack at standard high impedence, and a low-impedence balanced output on XLR, whcih can also take 48V phantom power if your preamp or DI box supplies it.

This was installed on my treasured Kimbara 23CRD semi-acoustic. This already had a basic Artec piezo pickup with passive bass/treble control. This worked pretry well, and was used live many a time with various amps, but I felt the guitar deserved an upgrade.

Installing it was a luthier job. The control panel was larger than the original Artec unit, and needed placing further forward on the guitar side in order to accommodate the curve of the control panel, so some routing was involved. The whole job and a basic setup cost about 60 GBP.

There is plenty of volume with the active setup.

The differences between the piezo pickup and the electro-magnetic one are revealing. I was surprised how much of the guitar's character comes through with the electro-magnetic p/u. The piezo sound is a little more delicate, with the characteristic piezo "click" which sometimes needs taming. The electro-magnetic p/u has none of this - just a good clear tone, which would probably stand just fine in itself, though I like having the option of adding a bit of "air" with the piezo.

The mic is a revelation. Bags of natural-sounding bass - too much for use live in most situations unless you've really got your monitoring sussed, but a very good-quality sound, with plenty of mids and highs, and a true reflection what's going on with the guitar.

The three pickups can be mixed and isolated to an extent. There's a two-way slider that lets you blend the piezo and e/m pickups (set it to 100% of one and you get 0% of the other), and the mic has its own volume and tone control (turn the piezo-e/m channel volume to zoro and all you hear is the mic. Blending the tones is quite subtle. For live use, you could probably get away just fine with using just the electro-magnetic p/u in a band situation.

The application where the full features of this setup should come into their own is recording. With a little rewiring ingenuity, it should be possible to isolate the e/m-piezo side of things from the mic, letting you record both and mix after the event to taste.

I play folk, guitar-oriented pop, for want of a better description, some jazz and also "experimental" music. It does everything I've asked of it.

I'd buy this unit again if it for some reason (heaven forbid) got separated from my guitar.

I've been playing over 30 years, and have used acoustic/semi-acoustic guitars with a variety of pickups, and this one really takes the biscuit. The EQ is very well judged, and can tailor the sound to any reasonable degree.

If i have a criticism, it's tied to the nature of the mic - I was fearing that it might be tinny, since it's quite small. Far from it. It's a bit bass-heavy in relation to the other two pickups, and there's not much you can do about that except adjust the amp tone controls (the onboard mic tone control does a nice job of boosting treble, but some bass cut would be welcome).

There's a phase-reverse switch to help combat feedback. This seems to have little effect on the mic sound - basically, if your setup is such that it's feeding back to the extent where it's needed, it's asking a lot for a relatively cheap unit to defeat it. It seems to be more effective with the piezo and e/m pickups, but they'll usually only feed back at pretty high volumes.

I'd like to have the facilty to easily isolate the outputs as suggested above, for recording purposes. (It wouldn't be beyond me to wire this up if I decided to.)

The mic volume is lower than the piezo and e/m pickups. If this wasn't the case, I think feedback would make the mic unusable in a gig situation.

The highly regarded luthier who fitted it said he'd installed many, and you got a lot of pickup for your money (and he didn't sell it to me!).

One welcome bonus is that having the e/m pickup lets me use my eBow properly on my Kimbara (whether it's plugged into an amp or not).

It gets a 9 because it seems tacky to give straight 10s in a review!