K&K Company Blog

Coming soon: New externally mounted guitar mic

Hello folks,

Thanks for checking in. Yes, it is almost ready to go, just waiting for the windscreens and the clamp-padding to arrive so we can start production.
It is a unidirectional condenser mic with an adjustable clamp, including a phantom powered mic-preamp with XLR output and just in case, a plug-in-the-wall power supply as well. It will also be directy compatible with the K&K Quantum Blender.

The included preamp has a special tone control that allows the user to shape the midrange for the very best tone reproduction.

We are excited, because this mic sounds really good and it plays quite loud before feedback too. Target retail price is $299.00

Hopefully we will have it available on the shelf within 2-3 weeks.

See you later my friends,

the Dieter

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Happy New Year / featuring Dietri’s 3rd album

Hello folks,

It has been a long time since the last post because we have been swamped with orders from all over the world. I would like to say a big “Thank You” to all our customers, you are the greatest!

Within the last few months I also spent countless evening hours working on my 3rd album “Real Men Love Cats”. Well - it is finally done. 18 songs, all originals, recorded in my home studio in the last 2 years.

I am happy to send everyone who is interested a free copy along with an order at K&K, just ask for it on the phone or email me when you order theman@kksound.com

This album is recorded with a variety of guitars, electric and acoustic. As usual I play everything myself, guitars, bass, some keyboards, some percussion and I also do all the computer programming.

Music is a wonderful positive hobby and I am very happy to have the luxury to be able to earn my living in a music related business. 

And by the way, you may already know, our CEO Karla also runs a small cat sanctuary at the K&K premises. Year-round there are about 20 cats, some indoor some out, we get them fixed, feed them and take care of them as long as they are here. All our employees love them and several of my new songs are dedicated to some special kitties who went over the rainbow bridge.

All the best wishes my friends, have a happy, healthy and successful new year and may many of your dreams become true.

Sincerely yours, the Dieter 

Posted in About K&K, Dieter | Comments Off

New Pure Mini high e-string pickup installation

Hello folks,

In case you wonder why we changed the mounting position of the high e/b string pickup, I’d like to try to explain it to you.

The main reason for this change is that in some guitar models the Pure Mini system has a lower response on the high e sting. Technically this has to do with the proximity of the x bracing to high e string. Braces dampen vibration and vibration is what the transducers pick up. Plus the high e string is the thinnest string and therefore the least powerful.

We tested this new location for over a year to make sure that we do not run into a problem of the b string being too low. This did not occur in any installation we or our authorized luthiers did. We installed the Pure Minis like this in a broad selection of guitar models regardless of the proximity of the X bracing.

The Pure Mini transducers pick up the vibration of the area where they are glued onto. A 1/4″ variation does not make much of a difference, though it helps to balance the high e string a little bit.

If you do not have an unbalanced high e string, which should be the majority of the guitar models out there, there is no need to change your existing installation!

We found that the new installation does not have any negative impact, but it can improve a weak high e string.

Greetings

The Dieter 

Posted in Guitar Pickups, Uncategorized | Comments Off

The new Pre-Phase preamp

Hello folks and first-up thanks for the overwhelming support on my new myspace page.

We are very happy to get so many orders for the new Pre-Phase system.
I personally think it is an absolutely great unit and worth twice the price. It somehow gets the best out of the Pure pickups.

Some customers asked if they could hard-wire the pickups to the Pre-Phase board but we do not like this idea out of 2 reasons. The weight and pull of the 3 pickup wires and strain relief issues. We factory seal the cable entry points on the preamp board for strain relief. This seal does not allow for a retrofit customer solder installation.

I very much recommend to use the RCA or 1/4″ connection we supply. If one really insists on hard-wiring, remove the jacks from the Pure pickups and the Pre-Phase input cable and splice/solder the cables together. You should shield this connection properly though, here is how to do this HOW TO MAKE A SHIELDED CABLE CONNECTION

Enjoy the summer 2009 my friends and keep up that great guitar-playing!
The Dieter

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Dieter’s new artist/music page

That’s right, I am not only the “Tech Dieter”, founder and pickup designer of K&K but also a guitarist. My artist name is Dietri and many years ago (back in Germany) I used to play professionally. Today I only play and record for fun though. For those of you who are interested in my music, please visit my new myspace page: www.myspace.com/dietri

Thanks and have fun! Dieter

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Why Don’t Major Guitar Manufacturers Use K&K Pickups?

A lot of customers ask us why the major guitar manufacturers (Martin, Gibson, etc.) don’t sell models with pre-installed K&K pickups. It’s not that we don’t get the offers, but we usually have to turn them down for one big reason: price.

The big guitar makers are used to getting rock bottom pricing on the electronics they put into their instruments.  When we deal with them, they usually ask for something in the range of 80 percent off the retail price. The bigger pickup manufacturers may meet those prices, but we can’t. Why? It’s about who makes the pickups, how they’re made, and how much to charge for the whole process.

All our products are 100% made in the USA, with American labor

While other pickup manufacturers outsource their labor or part of it to cheap countries, like Mexico or Asia, all our products are assembled and made in Oregon. We pay a fair wage to our employees and we give good benefits. Our techs and assemblers are highly skilled and specifically trained and some of our employees are musicians too, so they appreciate being able to make a living doing something they love.

Our products are assembled by human beings, not by machines

Having pickups built by machines can save money – but the quality usually suffers when a pickup is designed to be mass produced robotically. We design our pickups so that they sound great, not so that a machine can easily put them together and kick out 1000 per hour.

We don’t hike our retail prices to give bigger discounts

The easiest way to allow for 80 percent discounts and still be able to stay in business is to raise the retail price. At K&K, we refuse to pump up our prices like that because we don’t want to hurt individual customers.

The guitar manufacturers that we do work with are usually smaller companies with high-end instruments. These luthiers share our passion for great sound, and they don’t compromise on their product.

We would like thank our customers for using K&K products and support American jobs!

Posted in About K&K | No Comments »

The New Progression Tube Preamp

The introduction of the Progression naturally created a big buzz among the acoustic guitar players, especially the ones who are searching for very best sound.

Today I would like to post some additional info based upon discussions with players by phone and email.
First, what’s written about it on our website and in the Progression’s manual is really true and not just marketing blurb!

Let me go into detail here:

This tube preamp was specifically designed to compliment the Pure pickups.

I have always felt that the Pure pickups sound very true and natural, but if their sound is missing something compared to a really great mic, I think it is that their high-end response could be boosted.

To achieve this, we took advantage of one of the tubes’ biggest strengths, their natural and beautiful treble response (compared to solid state technology which tends to sound somewhat synthetic when trebles are boosted). Tubes can add that steel string “shimmer” and “silver” in an extremely elegant fashion. But please understand that this comes with a small trade-off: a slightly higher noise floor.

That’s actually why solid state technology overtook tube technology already decades ago. Plus in today’s digital world, players get more and more aware of every little amount of noise.

It is of course true, that in a recording situation noise is a concern. But in a live setting, in my opinion, a small amount of noise is usually not a factor.

Our Progression is built with plain and true tube technology. When designing it, we were EXACTLY after the above described elegant high-end response! We purposely went the old-fashioned way of hand wiring and adding no transistors at all in Progression’s tube stage.

Please keep in mind that ANY other studio-mic-tube-preamp on the market today is a hybrid circuit, where the tube is used for the lower frequencies only, but the high-end is processed by solid state components in order to satisfy today’s noise conscious customers. This technique, of course, does NOT provide the tube’s refined treble response!

In short, if you want to naturally enhance the high-end of your Pure pickup (similar to a condenser mic) and do not mind minimally increased noise, compared to a solid state preamp, the Progression is for you.

If you are not sure, you can always take advantage of our return policy and test the Progression at your home.  I  think this is an absolutely great unit, like the “icing on the cake” type of addition to the Pure pickups.

Signing off, the Dieter.

Posted in New Products, Preamps | Comments Off

Long Time, No Write

I can’t believe I haven’t written for so long.

The Dieter ripped his achilles tendon when he tried out a new toy, a so-called Trikke.

In our private lives, the Dieter is my husband, and now I have driver’s duty, too. The cast will stay on for a few months, but he is in good spirits.

A couple of special footer scooters, aka Dieter speeders, were built, so he gets around quite well.

Goes to show how crafty we can be in this company.

We also had a visit from Rich Osweiler of Acoustic Guitar Magazine last week.

It was a lot of fun to show him around and talk shop. It is rare that we get a lot of visitors, as we are e a little out of the way here in Oregon.

But it is such a wonderful place, and we would not want to be anywhere else.

First of all, for all you out-of-staters, it is pronounced “Orrygen.”

Pretty sizable, as landmass goes, we have a population of less than 4 million, most of them over in the valley, in the  I-5 corridor, with Portland, Salem, Eugene/Springfield and Medford.

We are in Coos Bay, right on the Southern Oregon coast.

As a matter of fact, this is the so-called Oregon Bay Area, and with about 30,000 population, the biggest coastal town between San Francisco and Seattle.

When we decided to move the company here in 1995, from Bavaria, it was a gamble, but it all worked out so well, and I am so happy to be in this place.

I can see the bay when I look out my office window, and even though it rains quite a bit, I have come to love the rain. After all, everything is so green here most of the year and we get the most wonderful rainbows, like on the picture I took a couple of years ago, right across the street from the company compound.

Posted in About K&K, Karla | Comments Off

Coming soon: Updated Mandolin Twin

Today I would like to announce the upcoming release of an improved version of the existing Mandolin Twin system. We were working with Austin Clark from clarkmandolins.com who went the extra mile to test several positions and mounting methods on one of his great instruments. He worked together with a high caliber player.

They found out that the very best sound was actually achieved with internal installation of both pickups placed just outside of the bridges feet, which means right next to the center of both f holes. These gladly are also the easiest spots to retrofit the pickups into the mandolin.

Austin wrote this: “I would recommend to luthiers who have trouble mounting their pickups here due to tone bar locations to either build the instrument with the offending tone bar 2-3mm more towards the middle to accommodate the width of the pickup or place the pickup right behind it. I have chosen to alter my design standard for tone bar location since these are the pickups I think have the best sound out there. Changing the position of the bar has not had any affect on the sound that I can tell.”

We are planning to introduce 2 new models which will replace the existing Mandolin Twin. One model for internal mount only - with endpinjack - and a second one with a carpenter jack (outside mounted jack with special clamp shown in the link with a violin pickup). The transducers remain the exact same ones as used in the existing Mandolin Twin. The difference will be in the cable length and the way the cables are fastened inside the mandolin.

With the new upcoming carpenter jack model you do not have to drill a hole for the jack. The pickup cables will go from the jack into the treble F hole and the pickups are mounted inside. This option is great for anyone who wants the best sound but no hole or permanent alteration of his/her instrument.

It will be few weeks until we have them ready to go though, just wanted to let you know ahead of time.

Signing off, the Dieter.

Posted in New Products, String Instrument Pickups | Comments Off

Absolut Ballistic Marimba

Greetings, this is Dieter and today I’m going to give writing my first blog post ever a shot. The good thing is that I have a really exciting topic to write about.

At the end of last year, Jeff Lieberman contacted me with a rather unusual request. He wanted me to build a custom marimba pickup system for a “ballistic marimba”. He said that he was in process of fulfilling a project sponsored by Absolut Vodka, building a special marimba where small rubber balls are shot by individual canons, each one aimed onto one particular marimba bar which then plays the tone. This was designed to be interactive via the internet, so that a “player” at home could actually trigger the individual canons via his computer and watch the result on a life video at home. The K&K pickups would play the audio sound of the marimba bars.

Please check out the official ballistic marimba website, and watch the movie, too.

This is pretty typical for custom stuff that we at K&K have done or were involved with over the last 25 years. Lots of crazy ideas, projects, and products. The ballistic marimba is probably the most sophisticated one though.

To name some other “crazy” projects, K&K once had a product called the Hot Glove, a pair of gloves with trigger pickups sewn into the fingertips and cables running out through the players sleeve, then connected to a Midi drum sound module. Different drum-sounds were assigned to the individual fingertips. This way the player could play drums by tapping on all kinds of surfaces (like parts of his/her body, tabletops, doors, walls etc.; you get the picture).

Another project we were involved with was amplifying step dancers using Big Shot transducers.

And there was this bottle tree we once built for a trade show, 1 full octave of precisely tuned bottles with Hot Spot transducers attached, hanging on a rack, to be played with a mallet. Other projects involved amplifying sound sculptures, engine vibration measurements, language sound analyzing via a transducer close to the larynx and of course the “every day” K&K Custom Shop orders.

I guess that all those endeavors have widened my horizon in respect to pickup design and I am glad that we did every single one of those “crazy” projects.

Signing off,
The Dieter

Posted in Amplification, Dieter | Comments Off