Hi all
After years of feeling that working with a vocal mic (like an sm-57) was the best choice for me for both vocals and fiddle, because I do both in performance, I recently had a bad experience when the sound guy didn’t provide a good mix during the fiddle breaks. I thought it would help the sound engineers if I provided a quality signal for them to work with and so I asked for advice from locals and decided to try an “LR Baggs violin pickup with external jack mount” (found it on Amazon with that exact title) (it’s probably the same pickup Casey mentioned and is integrated in a quality violin bridge which must be properly fitted on your fiddle), and the external jack is mounted on the left side lower bout; I’m lucky in that I could drive to Robertson’s violin shop in Albuquerque and get an excellent luthier to install the new bridge and the external jack mount. I also purchased an LR Baggs Venue acoustic guitar DI device, it says it’s for acoustic guitar but it works just fine with the signal from the violin pickup and when properly setup gives a very nice signal to the sound mixer.
I was concerned that the new bridge with the attached pickup would reduce the quality of sound when the fiddle is played acoustically — to my ear it has turned out to be excellent; when I do play with a sound system the DI must be properly setup for the amplified fiddle sound but I really love it!
