Donner Acoustic Guitar Pickup, DSS-12 Sound Seeker Guitar Pickups Humbucker Magnetic Passive Soundhole Pickup for Acoustic Guitar

The media could not be loaded. Donner Sound Seeker Acoustic pickup.I picked this up for my recently acquired Seagull acoustic/electric 12 string guitar. The Seagull has a Fishman Piezo system built into it, but system does not accurately project the tone of the guitar acoustically, and is a bit weak on the high end. Additionally, I have a couple songs I want to play on it that need an electric sounding pickup when played through my electric guitar amp. The Fishman generates a lot of feedback on that amp, so I decided to get a soundhole pickup. What attracted me about the Donner Sound Seeker is that it has 12 poles, and is humbucking.In the box is the pickup, with the lead pre-wired (with a strap peg mounting jack that you can install where your strap peg is, or on a leather strap dongle supplied), installation instructions, an Allen key to adjust the poles, a screwdriver to mount the pickup, and 3Mstick on clips to anchor down the wiring if you install it inside your guitar. Note: The poles are set at the factory with the bass side screws extending out of the top of the pickup, and the treble side extending out the bottom side of the pickup, so you will want to level them out to start with, and adjust to balance your tone as you see fit (my demos were made with all the poles even just under the top of the pickup, I have since tweaked them to be a bit more high on the treble side).Installation was easy, though the screwdriver included is a bit small for tightening the clamping screws, so for the last few turns; I used a screwdriver with the correct size head. Install was a snap, and the clamp grabs well, and does not take a lot of clamping pressure to stay stable.The tone is very good, and much more sensitive to picking dynamics than most acoustic piezo systems. What surprised me is that the output is very strong without any kind of preamp. 60% volume on the Donner was the same volume as 60% on my Fishman system (which has a battery powered preamp!). The Donner at max, is not as loud as the Fishman maxed, but it’s also not distorted like the Fishman gets when it is maxed, as you can hear in the video.Tone into an electric guitar amp is very good, with no feedback, and absolutely no hum, you can get very convincing Tom Petty/Byrds electric 12 string tone with the Donner Sound Seeker (specifically what I bought it for).I like the look, design, and tone of the Donner Sound Seeker DSS-12 Humbucking pickup, and it definitely a good value for the Money. I intend to mount the strap peg mount permanently in my Seagull, which will allow the guitar to have a Stereo output.

I did a perminant install with this pickup in to an older fender acoustic. For how affordable it is, you really can't beat this. I looked for quite a while to find a pickup that had the option to perminantly install, and was thrilled when I found one that was also humbucking. Since this is a universal pickup the tone is obviously not fantastic out of the box, but with some light eq this pickup really does sound fantastic. I was slightly disappointed that the pickup does produce a very slight hiss, but it's really not that noticable and easy to work around. I'm not sure you can beat the value for the money.

UPDATE: you can put the pickup on the bottom portion of your soundhole to get a more bridge-y pickup tone out of it too! works great.finally a good easy solution for adding a pickup to your regular old acoustic guitar. while there are plenty of different ways to go about it, most of the time you're either paying a lot of money, having a whole bunch of cumbersome, bulky accessories or you're just going to get a pickup you can't even hear. this seems to solve the basic problems all in one shot. the humbucker has surprisingly good output to run into my regular electric setup, low noise, and good volume/tone control that is easy to get to.the big thing is making the input jack fit inside your guitar. my acoustic is a Takamine but not a real expensive one, so i didnt mind drilling into the bottom of it, but it still took a surprisingly large bit and a lot of elbow grease to shove it in there. but i wasn't going to try to clip it or fiddle with the thing always coming off or getting in the way.definitely wouldn't recommend if you got a fancy Martin or Gibson, but being able to run my acoustic into my pedalboard and record has opened up a lot of fun ! if you havent ever fuzzed out an acoustic guitar, i highly recommend it.i will say the tone is very similar to a clean electric, kind of appropriately reminiscent of a hollowbody neck pickup. you can hear the hollow-body properties, and it's a really nice tone, but if you want to do that shimmery, super-clean acoustic sound (like the worship band at church or something idk), then you might want to look elsewhere. this one also wont work with nylon strings. it's cool you can adjust each pole piece, but i didnt see a real need or huge difference by adjusting them. also didn't seem to be a huge deal if the strings dont line up with the pole pieces perfectly. really enough output here!!super cool product!