Gearank

LR Baggs is a premier manufacturer of pickups for acoustic instruments, with their pickups being the stock option on many of Gibson's guitars.

The company’s pickups are used in a wide array of genres, with notable endorsees including: Cage the Elephant, Ricky Skaggs, Sierra Hull, Brad Paisley, and The Old Crow Medicine Show.

This pickup features construction unique to LR Baggs with a second hum-cancelling coil suspended by a proprietary mount below the main coil which is done to catch the resonance of the body aside from the strings.

The result is a natural sounding signal that sounds close to the acoustic tone of the instrument.

Key Features

• Type: Soundhole
• Required Mods: None
• Installation Difficulty: Low
• Controls: None

Pros

Users love how natural the tone sounds while attenuating feedback. This is a common compromise for transducer based pickups as they tend to pick up vibrations of the body more than magnetic pickups directed towards the strings.

Cons

Users found they needed a good preamp to get a strong signal to the mixer. Sometimes this is remedied by adding more input gain on the mixer end but since this is out of the control of many stage musicians, a preamp would solve this.

Overall

The LR Baggs M1 gets consistent high marks for its good reproduction of your guitar's sound. Take note that the better the guitar, the better this pickup will perform.