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Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on September 10, 2022KK pure mini
I bought this because it was inexpensive and yet has a really great following and reputation for one of the more natural sounding pickups. It also has a reputation of a fairly easy install.
There are lots of install videos of in depth installation procedures and I will say the procidee color manual is superb.
If you ask me how the install went? Il tell you how frustrated I was. Not at the fault of the product. But because I was installing it in a tiny Martin mini LX1 guitar which is a travellers guitar. The sound hole is very small and there's not a whole lot of space in there to manoever. So my advice here is, of you're buying this to install on a small guitar like mine, for example , baby Taylor or a small parlor guitar, be aware of the install difficulty.
I am pretty sure if you have a normal sized guitar the install would be extremely easy.
Anyway after a painful 2 hours I got it done but ended up with a lot of superglue to clean off my hand. It was not the most ideal install for me and was NOT a clean looking end result. But did it work ok? YES.
This pickup lives up to the hype. Extremely natural tone. Very balanced full output and not so overly high exaggerated highs. It maintains the Martins woody boxy acoustic sound and has almost zero quack that a piezo UST pickup would have sounded.
Some mention the output is low and you would need a preamp. I will say that's not true. I am finding very good output despite it being a passive pickup. The only thing I'd say is that it sounds even better with a bit of eq and personal taste for compression. I like to dial in some more bass for my application since it is a baby guitar.
Ask for feedback , there is none. I then cranked it up super high on my PA and then it started feeding back. But this is extreme example and if you're on a very loud stage you'd want a notch filter. You will NOT have issues with feedback as much as you would on a microphone based pickup like LRbaggs and some Fishmans that have microphones under the saddle .
One of the nice advantages of it being a passive pickup is that it has no 9v battery. Zero maintenance after the install. But that also means there's no gain control nor tone control right on the guitar like you would on something like a LRbaggs pickup. That's a small disadvantage in my opinion. On my other guitar I have the LRbaggs with the gain and volume controls right at the guitar .
So how does this compare with LRbaggs Lyric? Well for one, Lyric installs much easier. No superglue. It is WAY faster and easier to install one mic rather than fussing with 3 transducers and superglue. KK pure mini is more of a permanent install due to the glue. LRbaggs can be easily removed and installed elsewhere with very little effort and zero damage with the guitar gutts. LRbaggs is an active pickup so it comes with the input gain dial and the volume control. KK has nothing since it's passive. However KK Does offer an add-ON kit that lets you control volume but it is still not an active pickup. I will also say KK pure mini has another more expensive version With the active pickup too so it's not as if the option doesn't exist. In terms of sound I find the Pure mini has a deeper tone and fuller sound compared to Lyric. Lyric NEEDS some EQ to dial back the bass. It's a thin sound. While the Pure mini I found sounds darn good without it . Lryic feeds back a lot. Pure mini does not. Overall I really like the pure mini over the Lyric. If I were to do it all over again with my main guitar , I would've picked a KK ultra pure mini which is the active pickup version of the same pickup. My reasons are: low feedback on stage and the unprocessed raw sound is more natural sounding than LRbaggs Lyric and Anthem.
There you have it. I love this pickup and can easily recommend it to anyone considering a high quality acoustic sound. I didn't think I'd say it but, I think this is better than ubiquitous LRbagss solutions. Wow. And when you go this route you have many pure mini options like passive, passive with vol control addon, full active version, and also K&K's external preamp box as well. Lots here to research and choose.
