Product News:

New pickup system for mandolin now available 

At "Musikmesse" in Frankfurt, Germany Shadow released a brand new pickup system for mandolin. The pickup received a fantastic response from musicians worldwide and is now available in music stores.

Eight strings, brilliant sound but unfortunately much too quiet when you play live on stage with your band. This is the deplorable situation that faces most mandolin players who play in a bluegrass, folk or rock bands. What can you do?

So far, the solutions were passive piezo pickups for mandolins. Those are available either as transducers which stick to the instrument’s top or install in the mandolin’s bridge. So far, so good – unfortunately, in many cases both ways sound like almost everything but not a mandolin. It sounded very synthetic and not authentic at all.

Instruments with a short scale and high string tension like mandolin cause another problem in combination with a bridge pickup. Every time your plectrum touches the string you will hear a “click” before you hear the actual tone. And when it gets down to business at the live gig it comes to an bad end: Because those passive piezo pickups only supply a little output signal your audience gets a lot of hissing and undesired feedback instead of pure mandolin tones. You have to be kidding!  There are good pickups for everything including zither!  Why not mandolin?

Shadow solved all these problems in an “active” way: Based on Shadow’s innovative NanoMAG pickup technology emerges a unique quad pickup which unites four active NanoMAG pickups – one for each pair of strings.

Because the NanoMAG doesn’t reside in the bridge, you won’t hear the annoying “click” as you do when you amplify your mandolin with a passive piezo pickup.

And the best feature: With the gain pots you are now able to adjust the output volume of each pair of strings individually and this guarantees a perfectly balanced output.

The electronics of the preamp hide elegantly underneath the supplied pick guard. With the volume, bass and treble controls you will be able to adjust your personal, acoustic sound easily. A high quality endpin jack with 6.3mm (1/4”) output is supplied.

Now, your mandolin sounds like a mandolin: faithfully acoustic and pure mandolin sound. Annoying clicks, hissing, humming and feedback belong to the past, now. It is electro mando time!

SH 928 NMG-4 suit all mandolins that are built in typical teardrop style (A-type) while SH 927 NMG-4  suits bluegrass mandolins (F-type).