Pickup Lines
LR Baggs founder Lloyd Baggs is looking forward to exploring new digital horizons with the company’s Voiceprint technology
This year sees LR Baggs celebrating its 40th year in the pickup-building industry. With its new Voiceprint digital technology poised to make further waves, the Californian firm has remained leaders in its field ever since its first acoustic-guitar pickup model, the LB6, was released back in 1980. From there, founder Lloyd Baggs has continually pushed pickup technology into new areas, culminating in such industry standards as the M1 soundhole pickup, the Element undersaddle unit, the iBeam bridge plate pickup, and the Anthem mic system.
Although he is perhaps better known for his pickups, Lloyd’s success in the acoustic world was born from a love of building guitars – including instruments for the likes of Jackson Browne, Graham Nash,
Janis Ian and Ry Cooder. “That’s how I got into the pickup business,” explains Lloyd. “I love and respect the acoustic guitar and I’ve always wanted the pickup to reflect the sound of the body.”
Over the years, LR Baggs has expanded its range to include a pickup for virtually every situation on stage. But how do you go about choosing the right one? “Whenever anybody asks me, ‘What kind of pickup should I get for my guitar?’ my response is always, ‘Where and what do you play?’” says Lloyd. “We serve a very wide range of musicians, from weekend warriors to people that are playing stadiums, and the elephant in the room is always feedback. Balancing good sound and stability in a pickup is the game. So, the question is, how loud do you need to play?
“The LB6 is our original pickup. We brought that out in 1980 and we still make them. So many great artists, like Paul McCartney and James Taylor, started with the LB6 and still use it. It’s got a really pleasing sound. It has a certain presence and stability that allows you to be free. People fall in love with different technologies from different eras and sometimes they don’t want to move away from that. In-ears have helped a lot, but in an arena, the magnetics are the most stable.
“Tom Petty and so many other large arena players used our M1 [magnetic soundhole pickups]. Tom Petty and David Gilmour pretty much put the M1 on the map for us. That thing is bulletproof, but it really is body-sensitive, so we’ve been able to get a little bit of microphonic-like performance out of it. Our whole trick was to get the most natural sound possible given the circumstances.
“Our Anthem system is the best combination of stability and fidelity we’ve ever been able to engineer. Such a wide variety of artists are using it in all sorts of arenas – literally! – from Shawn Mendes to George Strait. That’s our top-of-the-line pickup system.
“People have been putting microphones in guitars forever, largely to try and deodorise the pickup, but the Anthem’s patented Tru-Mic technology makes it radically different. The problem of amplifying an acoustic guitar with a microphone is that the inside of it sounds like a trashcan! That’s because of the reflections. But we were able to engineer a PZM microphone that eliminates the effect of the echoes inside the guitar. With previous microphone/pickup mixing systems you’d get maybe two thirds pickup and one third microphone, but we were able to make it more like two thirds mic and one third pickup. The midrange in the guitar is where the money’s at – and we’re able to deliver that with a microphone which is also stable in terms of feedback.
“Our new Voiceprint impulse-response technology has the capability of altering the equation between fidelity and feedback. Not only does it do a great job of capturing the actual voice of the guitar, but it also learns where it’s going to feed back. If you’re playing a loud stage, you can just dial in as much feedback immunity as you need. It can actually pinpoint the problem frequencies and remove them more surgically. We’re very excited about this. Now that we’ve got this digital horizon for our company, it’s really exciting.
“The biggest thing for me is staying creative and moving forward with the super-talented team of people we’ve been blessed to work with every day.”
“The elephant in the room is always feedback. Balancing sound and stability in a pickup is the game”
“Tom Petty and David Gilmour pretty much put the M1 on the map for us. That thing is bulletproof”