GOACOUSTIC PICKUP SYSTEM strings, the less the pickup responds. The preamp compensates with 12 to 15 dB of gain, but everything downstream is working from a signal that was already wrong at the source.”
Richard McClish’ s RMC system represented a genuine departure from that approach, with individual saddles, individual sensing elements, individual input circuits, one for each string. McGill first encountered it in 1996:“ I saw and experienced his pickups and it was a game changer. For the first time in my life, I felt I could build a real acoustic guitar and amplify it at high volume levels.”
He used the RMC for years. Then he started hearing the tradeoff more clearly, and Shaw, coming to it fresh, could see exactly the problem. The way the individual elements captured energy required isolating the strings from the guitar’ s top, which changed how the instrument behaved before it ever reached the electronics.“ Think of the RMC pickup as a bridge for cars,” he explains.“ The string is coming down on the middle of the bridge and the bridge is vibrating up and down. But that means the only way for vibrations to travel down is for them to travel to each end and down through the abutments. It’ s not a direct path, and that kills the acoustic sound.”
A player with a good guitar wants that acoustic sound above everything else. It’ s the whole point of a fine instrument. The RMC solved the amplified problem by compromising the unamplified one, and for anyone paying close attention, that wasn’ t good enough.
The insight at the center of Go Acoustic sounds, in retrospect, like something someone
“ THE PIEZO“ QUACK”— BECAME SO FAMILIAR THAT PLAYERS STOPPED HEARING IT AS A COMPROMISE. IT WAS SIMPLY THE ACCEPTED SOUND OF AN AMPLIFIED ACOUSTIC GUITAR.”
should have tried decades earlier. Says Shaw,“ We already had individual transducers, one for each string, either Graphtech or RMC. And then I realized, why not just make this thing a six-channel mixer and give it a fader! You’ ve already got individual inputs; why not give it a signal chain just like you would in a studio mixer?”
In a recording studio, sources are kept separate for as long as possible. A drum kit runs through individual channels, each with its own gain structure, before anything gets combined. But the acoustic guitar had always been treated differently at the live end: six strings collapsed into one signal at the first stage, and everything shaped from there. Shaw stopped accepting that as a given.“ You don’ t have to sum first. You can do other things before you sum. That’ s standard mixer architecture: input stage, volume control, filtering, then sum, followed by global volume control.”
McGill saw immediately what this meant for the saddle. Individual signals per string required
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