Banjo transducers

Site last updated 12/09/2004.
This particular page was created 11/22/2004 and last updated 11/28/2004

Picture from Music123

There's no doubt that a good microphone placed at a suitable distance in front of the instrument produces the best amplified banjo sound. There are some serious practical drawbacks to it, however:

The microphone picks up everything that happens around it, not just the banjo.
It can easily cause feedback even with a relatively low onstage sound level.
If you move around onstage, you loose the sound.

Attaching the microphone to the banjo helps a little (and reduces the sound quality a little), but if you want a really reliable system, you need a transducer.

What is a transducer?

A banjo transducer is a small sensor that is attached to and catches the sound vibrations directly from the banjo head. The advantages to this are:

A transducer only picks up the banjo sound.
It is much less prone to feedback than a microphone.
It allows you to move around freely (provided you use a long enough lead of course).
You can attach a preamp to the banjo and have your own volume and tone controls.
There's no microphone stand in the way on stage.
It's usually (but not always) cheaper than a quality microphone.

But there are some disadvantages too, of course:

It can never give quite as good a reproduction of the acoustic sound as a good microphone can (although it's far better than many people seem to think).
You sometimes need a small preamp/buffer box (not a big issue, but it's there).
Finding the correct placement is very critical and sometimes very difficult.
A transducer is attached directly to the head and even the lightest one is bound to dampen the banjo's acoustic sound a little bit.
There are lots of different transducer brands and types of very different quality out there and vey little reliable information what works and what doesn't.

Unfortunately there is no perfect solution, not even a single solution that work best on all occasions. A rule of thumb is that the louder your band plays, the more likely is it that you should use a transducer rather than a microphone, but there are lots of exceptions and of course, there's always the question of personal taste.

Choosing the right transducer

As I write this (autumn 2004), there seem to be four manufacturers who offer banjo transducers of a much higher quality than their competitors. I haven't had the chance to try all of them myself, so these presentations are partly based on what I've been told from other banjo players.

K&K Sound

No matter what kind of instrument you play: When in doubt, try K&K Sound! They manufacture a wide range of relatively inexpensive transducers for all kinds of instruments, they're always among the best, and sometimes they leave their competition way behind!

Their banjo transducer may not be their best product. It's a bit on the heavy side, so it dampens the banjo's acoustic sound a bit too much. Usually that's not a problem, but if you use your banjo acoustically a lot and need a loud tone from it, you may be better off with a Schatten or McIntyre.

Apart from that objection, the K&K banjo transducer performs really well. It produces a loud (no real need for a preamp) and quite realistic banjo tone. Perhaps most important is a detail far too often overlooked: K&K supplies their transducers with very detailed and easy-to-follow installment instructions totally eliminating the "hit and miss" installing that's always been the transducer's main downfall.

I use K&K transducers for nearly all my instruments myself, and I'm not likely to change that in a hurry.

K&K also has a generic miniature transducer called "Hot Spot" btw. It probably won't give as good a banjo sound as a dedicated banjo transducer, and you'll certainly need a preamp for it, but it's very lightweight (meaning a minimum of acoustic dampening) and costs only 30 dollars, so it may be worth a try.

K&K Sound's home page.

Schatten

I only heard about Schatten's banjo transducer from a posting at Banjo-L and don't really know much about it. It looks really interesting, although I seriously doubt their claim that it doesn't affect the acoustic sound at all. No matter how you look at it, a transducer means adding some mass to the head, and you can't avoid dampening altogether.

Soundwise - well as I said I haven't had the chance to try it yet. They have a demo of their guitar transducer at their site and although it sounds far better than the more common guitar transducer brands, it doesn't seem to be able to match KK Sound's quality level. Then again, that are guitar pickups and since the banjo pickup seems to be the weakest spot in KK's product range, Schatten may be an alternative well worth checking out.

Schatten's home page.

McIntyre

The McIntyre Feather was quite a sensation when it first appeared. Like most transducer manufacturers, McIntyre focuses on guitars, but its lightweight design does make it especially suitable for the banjo.

The main problem with it seems to be that it's very sensitive to positioning, so you may have to spend a lot of trial-and-error time to get the most out of it.

McIntyre's home page.

Pick-up The World

Pick-up The World's transducers are a bit unusual in that they use a strip of some flexible, ultra-lightweight synthetic material rather than a rigid metal transducer. Sounds like a very good idea to me and the soundclips at their site (only guitars as usual) are very impressive indeed. I've heard some complaints about hum problems though.

Pick-up The World's home page.

The big guys

All these four are small companies run by one or a handful of dedicated people. You won't find their pickups in normal music stores, only from specialist stores and directly from the manufacturer.

So how about the big names in acoustic instrument pickups? Fishman? Baggs? Shadow? Artec? B-Band?
Honestly, they don't stand a chance. They all cost a fortune and when it comes to sound quality B-Band is the only one who's even close to what the four small manufacturers have to offer.

Actually, since this is supposed to be a page about banjo transducers, not transducers in general, there's an even simpler answer: of the big ones only Fishman has made a clumsy attempt to come up with a banjo pickup.

Cheapos

These specialised banjo aren't really expensive, but even so: you can get a standard piezo transducer for just a penny or two. So why not go for the cheapest solution?

At one gig I happened to try a cheap (and really) weird one I picked up at Ebay for next to nothing and ended up with the best banjo sound I've ever had! That turned out to be a freak "accident" though. It seems that for some reason that particular pickup suited that particular banjo and the inhouse PA of that particular venue perfectly. Although I tried a lot I was never able to reproduce that result again, so I gave up on it.

One cheap transducer that did always give me good sound though, was an old BArcus Berry guitar transducer - the first transducer ever to hit the music market! After I sanded down the casing as much as I dared, it weighed next to nothing (that is: it hardly affected the banjo's acoustic sound at all) and with the right positioning it produced a tonal quality that could easily match any transducer I've tried on any instrument.
So why did I stop using it? Well, the tone may have been good, but it wasn't very strong, forcing me to use lots and lots of preamplification with all the extra noise that implies. Also, no matter how much shielding I tried, it kept picking up hum from the house's electric system, and even on a few occasion radio signals!

I suppose the answer to the cheapo-vs-specialist transducer question is that you can get just as good a result from an inexpensive oe, but unless money's really short it's not worth all the extra hassle and insecurity.