The Fishman Rare Earth pickups are magnetic pickups that mount in the soundhole of steel-string acoustic guitars.  Several different models are available including a single-coil model, a humbucking model, and a model that incorporates a small microphone on a flexible gooseneck.  This report concerns the humbucking model.

Damping of acoustic response is one major objection to soundhole pickups.  The Rare Earth pickups are slim and fairly light weight.  On a standard dreadnaught guitar they mount far "up" the soundhole, near the end of the fretboard, and they don't seem to cause much damping in that position.

The pickup features a built-in preamp that runs off of watch batteries.  The only control is a small lever switch mounted on the body of the pickup and reached by poking your finger into the soundhole between the edge of the soundhole and the low-e string.  Obviously, this switch isn't intended to be used mid-song!  The switch adjusts the tone slightly, giving a little more "sparkle" in one position.

The pickup mounts easily with two cork-lined screw clamps.  The unit comes with an endpin jack and is fully wired.  Even the solder-challenged can mount this pickup easily.  The endpin jack comes with a plastic body that lets it double as an inline jack for temporary use.  The jack is rather large and heavy though so I recommend that you install it as an endpin jack if you will be leaving the pickup on the guitar.  Of course, if the reason you are using a soundhole pickup is to avoid modifying a valuable guitar, by all means use the jack as an inline jack – just be very careful about allowing it to inadvertently bang against the guitar during transport and storage.

I have met one pro who uses a Rare Earth (single-coil model) on his turn-of-the-century (last century) 12-fret Martin.  He does old-timey and cowboy music so, as you might imagine, a natural acoustic tone is very important to him.  I have heard that the single-coil model is even more natural sounding than the humbucker, though I haven't tested one myself.

The tone is excellent and acoustic-sounding, and the signal from the humbucker is free of bothersome noise.  However, the output is not at a very high level.  I found that I had to turn on the 20db mic boost at the computer's mixer when recording directly to my computer.  Without that boost the signal was present and audible but was not very far above the noise floor of the inexpensive audio card in my computer. 

It is possible to tell that the pickup is magnetic, but only just possible.  I really haven't heard any other soundhole pickup that is quite as acoustic sounding as this one.  That said, ears and "tone" are terribly subjective things so I've included a couple of sound samples so you can make up your own mind.  For these samples, the pickup was mounted on my Seagull S6 cedar-top dreadnaught.  The D'Addario™ light gage phosphor bronze strings (#EJ16) had been on the guitar about a week and were still lively though well past the initial "jangliness" of new strings.  The guitar was plugged directly into the mic input of my computer's sound card.  On the computer's volume control, the 20db mic boost was turned on and the level was set at about four.  The samples are softly-played fingerstyle.*  The sound was sampled at 22khz, mono, and then CDex was used to convert the wave files to 48Kbps MP3s.  Cool Edit was used to crop the samples but the samples are completely dry – no equalization, reverb, noise reduction, or other manipulations were used.  Obviously, you should be able to get even better results using equalization and/or a good acoustic amp.

I had to use 48Kbps MP3s to get adequate quality.  If you are on a dial up connection you may want to download the files and play them from your hard drive instead of streaming them:

^*Please forgive the poor quality of the playing.  I'm just learning fingerstyle so the samples are a bit plain.

The Fishman Rare Earth pickups may be the most natural-sounding soundhole pickups available.  To my ears, at least, they sound more natural than many under-saddle piezo systems.  The Rare Earth pickups are not cheap – even after a pretty deep discount at my local store the price was enough to make me wonder if the pickup was really that much better than all the others on display – fortunately, I think it was.

John Atchley
December, 2000