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Posts Tagged ‘KNA Pickups’

Gear Review: KNA UK-2 Ukulele Pickup

Posted in pickups, Ukulele, tagged , on October 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Summary: Like its cousin for the classical guitar, the NG-2, the UK-2 is a piezo pickup that slips under the string loops on the tie-down bar. And like the NG-2 the sound that this pickup produces is absolutely natural, capturing even the subtle harmonics and overtones that my uke creates. And at $99, it’s an affordable solution to get a great sound!

Pros: Incredibly easy to install. In fact, it took me more time to loosen my strings than it did to slide the pickup under the loops! As I mentioned above, the sound is crisp and natural.

Cons: None.

Price: $99

Tone Bones:

Having experience with the NG-2, I figured this would be yet another great pickup from KNA and I wasn’t wrong. Don’t be fooled by the low price. As I always say: It doesn’t have to be expensive to sound good.

Funny What You Can Find In An Antique Store

Last weekend while I was shopping in an antique store in Healdsburg, CA, I heard the beautiful sound of a ukulele being played. Recognizing the tune and the playing style, I realized my son was playing. So I walked over to where he was and I saw him playing this absolutely gorgeous instrument. When he saw me, he handed me the uke and I immediately fell in love with it and just about bought it on impulse.

But the pragmatic side of me took over and I knew I had to do some research, so I looked up the ukulele. From what I could gather at the time, the Alulu brand is part of a Taiwanese company. According to forum posts I read, Alulu produces inexpensive instruments that tend to be a step or two above the cheapo stuff, and as such, quality tends to be a little hit or miss.

The recommendation of those who have them is to play a few, which means this brand is a bit like the Squier brand for Fender. They’re excellent guitars but you have to play a few to find the gems. With my Alulu, I got lucky and found a real gem of an uke!

This particular model, the UKT has an acacia top with Koa sides and back with a mahogany neck and a laminated koa headstock. The company claims the neck is Koa, but I know mahogany when I see it. 🙂 Maybe I’m wrong but that grain is pretty hard to mistake. But frankly, it just doesn’t matter because the uke sounds so good!

So I pulled the trigger and bought it…

Getting Gig-Ready

The gods must’ve been smiling on me because next week I’m playing a memorial service gig and the family asked me to play Brother Iz’ rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Normally I just play that on my guitar, but as soon as I purchased the uke, I knew I was going to use it for the gig. Given that, I knew that I had to get pickup for the uke, and I immediately thought of KNA. I wasn’t sure if they had one for ukulele, but I figured that if they had one for classical guitar, they’d have one for uke. Luckily they did and I immediately purchased it.

So Easy to Install!

Installing the pickup couldn’t be easier. Once your strings are loosened enough, it literally takes seconds to slip the stick under the string loops on the tie-down bar. In fact, it took me over 10 minutes to loosen my strings because the machine heads move so little with each turn. Then it took another 20 minutes after installing the pickup to tune up my uke and get the strings stable again.

How It Sounds

But here’s where it all pays off! Like the NG-2 this pickup is like having a microphone close up to the instrument! It just doesn’t pick up the sound of the instrument. It produces an incredibly natural tone that when recorded, sounds so close to the original sound of the instrument, it’s hard to tell the difference. And it’s incredibly sensitive as well, picking up even the slightest taps and rubs on the body.

I recorded a couple of clips to demo the pickup. These were recorded raw, right into GarageBand with no compression nor EQ and all ambient and reverb effects turned off. The sounds is awesome!

What’s so incredible to me is that as the pickup captures the natural sound of my uke, I will not have to do much EQ with it, if at all. And while I’ll probably add reverb or room ambient effects to create a more live sound, I just won’t have to do much more than that.

This is a winner!

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Gear Review: KNA Pickups NG-2 Classical Guitar Pickup

Posted in Guitars, tagged , , , , , on March 26, 2021| 8 Comments »

Summary: If you’re looking for a great amplification solution for your classical guitar, look no further. This pickup not only has a great, natural sound, it requires absolutely no modifications to your guitar!

Pros: Super-easy to install. Just loosen your strings, then literally slide the pickup under them on the tie-down bar. It takes less than 10 minutes! The pickup is also super-sensitive and even picks up subtle harmonics. The volume control on this model is VERY helpful to dial in gain.

Cons: The ONLY thing that’s even remotely negative is that you’ll need to run this through a DI box before you plug into an amp or PA system as this pickup can be a bit noisy if plugged directly into an input. But any performing musician using an acoustic guitar should have a DI in their bag already, so this is practically a non-issue. But for those that don’t have one, you’ll have to spend the extra cash.

Price: $99

Tone Bones:

Despite that single con, I love this pickup! Once I ran it through my Radial PRO passive DI, the pickup was absolutely quiet, whether I plugged it into my Katana Artist (which required using an XLR to 1/4″ converter), my JBL Eon One PA, or my M-Audio M-Track interface. The sound it produces is incredibly natural, and as you’ll hear in the clips below, just a dream to work with for recording!

It Doesn’t Get Any More Uncomplicated Than This

To the left is my vintage 1972 Hiroshi Tamura classical guitar that I received as a gift from a friend a few years ago. This was part of a three-guitar set she gave me that belonged to her late uncle who passed away in 2003. The guitars sat in her storage shed for 15 years, forgotten until she and her mom cleaned it out. Her mom wanted to give the guitars to the Salvation Army, but my friend suggested that they give the guitars to someone who’ll play them.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I while I fixed up and played the acoustic and electric guitars, I didn’t touch the classical guitar until a few weeks ago when I had an idea for a new song whose solo would be great using a classical guitar. Then I remembered the P40.

I had only looked at it once or twice since I got it. It had a couple of strings missing but was in otherwise great condition. But rather than work on the guitar myself, I took it into Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, CA to have it set up and strung. In the meantime, I started researching classical guitar pickups.

One requirement that I had for a pickup was that I wanted to get one that didn’t require drilling a hole at the butt of the guitar to install a jack. That didn’t leave me with many options other than soundhole pickups.

But fortunately, I ran across a review someone did on the Kremona (now KNA Pickups) NG-1 pickup a few years back. The big selling point of that pickup was that it didn’t require any modifications to be made to the guitar. And unlike under-the-saddle piezo pickups, didn’t require sticking contacts inside the guitar. It was literally a flat, wooden stick that slid under the string loops on the tie-down bar. And the sound quality in the reviews of that first version of the pickup was fantastic!

Still, my only nit about it was that it didn’t have a volume control. Being thorough, I surfed over to the KNA Pickups site, and saw that they had an updated version of the pickup, the NG-2, that had a volume control! But the best thing about it was that it only cost $99.00! That was far less than other solutions.

Technically, I could’ve gone the soundhole pickup route. Several manufacturers have them. I even have one installed in my Gibson J-45. But having a wire coming out of the soundhole is a bit annoying as it gets in the way. I had my Seymour Duncan installed that way and used painters tape to secure the wire to the body of my guitar. But I got nervous about the adhesive eventually ruining my guitar’s finish so I had it installed permanently.

But with NG-2, because it sits on the tie-down bar, the cord is completely out of the way. You can see that in the picture of my guitar. Plus, you’ll notice that the jack elevates the cord above the soundboard, so there’s no worry of it contacting the soundboard and vibrating while playing. The KNA folks really got this right!

How It Sounds

Now, as far as sound is concerned, I couldn’t be happier. The pickup is incredibly sensitive and as I mentioned above, manages to pick up even subtle harmonics. Look, it’s not going to be nearly as good as miking the guitar, but then to really capture the sound of an acoustic instrument, you have to have a hell of a good microphone, or use a couple of them.

The volume control is very nice, though it does seem to have a logarithmic taper to it, so little movements of the knob at the upper end of the volume sweep make huge changes in the volume. But that’s not really a big deal. Luckily there’s a nice resistance in the action of the knob, so you won’t have to worry about knocking the knob and changing the volume. Then again, the pickup is really out of the way of the playing area so that should never be an issue.

Below is a set of clips I put together to demonstrate the pickup. The first clip is the raw sound of the pickup with no EQ or any kind of signal processing. The second clip is the raw clip, but with a slightly scooped EQ, with super light compression (1.8:1) and with a touch of reverb and room ambience. The third clip pans the processed clip to the left and I play a solo with a longer tail reverb and deeper room ambience, keeping the compression and EQ the same.

I’m simply beside myself with how natural this pickup sounds. The raw recording is incredibly close to how my guitar sounds naturally. It really sounds like the guitar is right in front of me. Just amazing! And when I add just minimal processing, it takes the sound over the top!

It’s not common to get this kind of sound at such a reasonable price. The value proposition of this pickup alone makes it worth getting. But the ease of installation plus the sound quality makes this pickup – at least to me – the best choice for amplifying a classical guitar.

For more information, visit the KNA Pickups NG-2 page.

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First Impressions: KNA Pickups NG-2 Classical Guitar Pickup

Posted in Guitars, tagged , , , on March 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »

The NG-2 installed on my classical guitar

A few years ago, a friend of mine kindly gave me three guitars that belonged to her late uncle: A 1990 Simon & Patrick PRO acoustic, a 1993 Godin Artisan ST v5, and a 1972 Hiroshi Tamura P40 classical guitar. I fixed up the S&P and the Godin and have gigged with both since I got the guitars. But I didn’t touch the Tamura because I’m not a classical guitar player. So I kept it in its hardshell case, out of the sunlight.

But a few weeks ago, I started envisioning playing and recording solos with a classical guitar to get that natural woody sound that only a nylon string can produce. So I brought the P40 to my local guitar repair to have it set up and strung. When I got it back, I couldn’t believe just how gorgeous it sounded and just how well it projected its sound (I’ll do a review on the guitar at a later date).

The only problem was that if I wanted to gig with the guitar, I needed a pickup. Unfortunately, the soundhole is too small to fit my pickup of choice, which is a Seymour Duncan Mag Mic. Plus, the Mag Mic is really optimized for steel-string guitars. So I had to do some research.

One thing that I didn’t want was something that required me to drill a pickup hole in the guitar. The P40 is a real vintage guitar, and while it doesn’t have a big street value, it carries with it a lot of sentimental value for me and I didn’t want to be drilling holes in it, lest I alter its sound or mar the memory of my friend’s uncle. So I needed a good, portable solution. My search led me to the KNA Pickups NG-2.

The incredible thing about this pickup is that it sits on top of the tie block right behind the saddle. You loosen your strings so that you can slide the pickup right under them. It’s ingenious! It literally took me ten minutes to install it, with most of the time spent loosening my strings enough to be able to slide the pickup into place.

I do have to admit that I was a little leary of the pickup’s sound because it’s a piezo and they’re notorious for producing that “piezo quack.” But all my concerns were laid to rest once I plugged it into my amp. Once I dialed in the EQ, I couldn’t believe just how natural the pickup sounded. It really captured the woody tones of my guitar!

To be honest, the pickup does have a slight hum plugged straight into my amp, but I was able to get rid of most of the hum by dialing back the volume on the pickup, reducing the input gain on my amp, and controlling volume with the master volume. I should be able to eliminate it for the most part with a notch filter. And when using it to record, I can just isolate the frequency and take it out of the mix. Yeah, it’s a bit more work, but for how it sounds despite that hum, I couldn’t be happier.

When I do my full review on the pickup, I will include sound clips.

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