Pickup for metal body resonator

Dennis Anderson · From: Chicago, Illinois

I picked up a Recording King Parlor Metal Body Resonator and was wondering how or if I could install a pickup in this guitar. Thank you in advance for your help.

D Schubert · From: Columbia, MO, USA

National and Lace both make a very good pickup for metal-bodied resonators, but they are very pricey. Several players around here have carefully cut out a hole close to the neck to install a P-90 style pickup, like a Guitar Fetish Mean 90. More affordable and sounds pretty good on a non-vintage non-National guitar.

I don't care for the sound of a bridge-mounted piezo pickup, even though I have one. The sound is bright and brittle to my ears, not so musical.
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Dennis Anderson · From: Chicago, Illinois

Thanks for your input, D. I appreciate your help.

K Maul · From: Hadley, NY/Hobe Sound, FL

What type of resonator is it…biscuit, tricone or spider? If it’s a spider the Fishman JD Nashville is very good but it’s $250 BEFORE installation by a pro(and most guitar luthiers don’t know much about it). It also needs the right preamp to really sound good.
I wouldn’t cut a hole in my guitar to install a pickup. Lace makes a surface mount electric pickup that sounds pretty good. I use them on some of my guitars. You can get it for $70-100 which is reasonable for a quality pickup. Look on eBay or Reverb for LACE DOBRO NECK SENSOR.
There are others like 12-BAR BLUES($150)KRIVO($190-230). You could find an inexpensive surface mount jazz guitar pickup also, like a GFS or ALTEC or an old KAY or HARMONY. There is a compromise with all these. They are electric guitar pickups and don’t really capture the true acoustic sound of the guitar. It depends on how much you can spend and what you can live with.
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Steve Lipsey · From: Portland, Oregon, USA

Krivo generally is felt to be the best of the magnetic pickups...check the other threads here on the forum....
This is it:
https://www.krivopickups.com/store/p2/Krivo_Humbucking_Pickups_for_Resophonic_Guitars..html
I have one on my tricone (there really isn't another good option) that it isn't quite totally acoustically accurate, but is as good as a magnetic pickup gets. It is partially unspotted, so it picks up the acoustic vibration in addition to the magnetic response.

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Dave Mudgett · From: Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee

What works depends on the guitar and what you want it to sound like. Is it this Recording King RM-993 biscuit single-cone - https://www.recordingking.com/rm993? There are several variables - I assume you're talking about a 6-string (8-string is much more difficult):

1. Round neck vs. square neck.

2. Tri-cone vs. biscuit single-cone vs. spider single-cone.

With any type of surface-mounted pickup, it matters how much room you have between the strings and the surface where you want to mount the pickup. It is generally much easier to do some type of surface-mount on a square neck. I got a Krivo for my '35 National Triolian round neck, and it sort of worked. But the neck was reset before I got it, the action is moderately low, and the pickup was real close to the strings. There was enough magnetic pull on the strings sufficiently to noticeably de-tune when playing up the neck. Same deal with my cheap Chinese metal-bodied Tricone.

So I took it off and put it on my Goldtone Beard Signature 6-string squareneck resonator. I initially put it up by the end of the neck, and the strings were so high above the pickup that I was gonna have to shim it way up just to get a reasonable signal level. So just for the hell of it, I tried mounting it at the neck end of the cover plate, right atop the front of the cone, as you can see here. I didn't have to drill anything, the output jack attaches to the end pin. I love it - it actually sounds pretty natural - as Steve says, it's somewhat microphonic and really picks up the cone sound mounted like this, but naturally blends that in with the fairly strong signal produced by the coil in the magnetic field. And it doesn't feedback in the situations I've tried it in. Not super-loud, no drums, but with other amplified instruments and vocals.

I've had some piezo pickups on biscuit style resonators before. They're OK, but mostly they require drilling for an output jack, and they always sounded a bit plinky to me. And I don't want to do that on my '35 Triolian anway. I'm still looking for the right approach for that - probably some type of contact pickup. But on my cheap Chinese Tricone, I decided to just cut a hole in the top and put in a mini-humbucker-sized pickup. I went to one of my luthier buddies with a modern Gibson Firebird pickup and an old Kent soundhole pickup that I had cut off the wings 25 years ago to mount on a cheap round-neck dobro-style resonator, and an old Firebird mounting ring. They would have worked OK, but he had a real 60s Gibson-made mini-humbucker that was originally in a trashed Silvertone Chris Isaak Model that came out of the guitar store that I originally owned and ran, and that he bought the remnants of. He was worried it would be too microphonic - it is a bit microphonic. I told him that was fine, in fact preferable. So he dremelled a cutout and installed the pickup with volume and tone controls - you can see here:

Like the Krivo, it has just enough microphonicity to naturally blend in a bit of the cone sound with the signal produced by the coil in the magnetic field. It does sound more 'electric' than the Krivo mounted to the coverplate, but I like it. It has a sort of 'swampy' bluesy sound, pretty much what I was looking for.

There are quite a number of biscuit piezos and Schatten has a Tricone and other resonator pickups - e.g., this is the Tricone version - https://schatten-pickups.myshopify.com/products/tc. I haven't tried the Schatten, but I have tried biscuit piezos in other guitars over the years. I dunno, I'm pretty happy with what I have here. But I will have to figure out something else for my old Triolian. No way I'm drilling into this, nor do I want to replace the biscuit with a piezo'd out one:

Dennis Anderson · From: Chicago, Illinois

Thanks everyone for helpful info. Yes, Dave, it is that Recording King parlor resonator with a 9.5” hand spun cone… biscuit I guess. It is a round neck 6-string and sound quite good for an entry level resonator. I get the surface mount spacing issue. Thanks for relating your experience. I’ll measure the spacing and see what I’ve got to work with Really don’t want to attempt drilling…

Thanks everybody for your generosity in giving of your time and expertise.

Dennis Anderson · From: Chicago, Illinois

Ordered the smaller 2023 Krivo today from Jason. The adventure continues…

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