GOACOUSTIC PICKUP SYSTEM
“ SHAW GREW UP WITH AN ENGINEER’ S INSTINCT: BEFORE YOU ACCEPT HOW SOMETHING WORKS, FIND OUT WHY IT WORKS THAT WAY, AND WHETHER IT COULD WORK BETTER.”
The two men met through Greg Morrow, one of Nashville’ s premier session drummers in one of those odd twists of fate. McGill had been working with Richard McClish’ s RMC pickup system for years, finding in it a genuine improvement over what else was available, and then watching its advantages erode as the components got cheaper. By 2010, he had nowhere left to go. Shaw had the engineering background to see exactly where the category had gone wrong and what a serious attempt to fix it would require.
They began with Shaw building a replacement preamp for the McClish system. What happened when they set that preamp next to everything else on the market transitioned their thinking to a larger project. Peter White, who had been playing McGill instruments for years, provided early validation. The system worked. This all led to the central question: could the integrity of a high-end studio circuit be engineered to fit inside a guitar? Not an approximation of it, but the thing itself.
The history of acoustic amplification is, in McGill’ s telling, a history of partial solutions presented as complete ones:“ Going back
50 years,” he explains,“ amplification has always had limitations in how it was deployed. In the very early days, people literally stuck a record player stylus into a piece of wood and that was a pickup.” That’ s essentially what Les Paul was doing as a kid.
Indeed, for the first half of the 20th century the acoustic guitar simply couldn’ t compete at volume. Resonator guitars, with their metal cones, bought some projection but changed the instrument’ s voice in the process. Magnetic pickups arrived in the 1930s and solved the volume problem more completely, but at the cost of making the guitar sound like something else entirely: the strings amplified but the body left out of it. When piezo technology developed through the 1960s and came into wide use in the 1970s, it felt like a genuine answer. The crystal elements responded to the physical movement of the instrument— not just the strings— and crucially, you could push the volume without the guitar screaming back at you. For live performance, that last part was everything.
These solutions all address flaws that trace back to the original compromise of the under-saddle pickup. The sound it produced had a character of its own, and that character— the piezo“ quack”—
110 | SUMMER 2026