Hidden pickup

[Bo Grohl]

Hello.
Not being able to source a flat pickup for a reasonable price, I tried this. Its a cheap artec secured under the coverplate with 2 sided tape. It works too. Some reduction in output but nothing that can't be fixed with a knob turn. Sound fine too.
TT

[Michael Messer]

I used to do this a long time ago on a Style O. I stripped the casing off the pickup so the coverplate was its casing. It worked okay, but I stopped doing it when it fell off in the middle of a gig. This was all a long time ago, sometime in the 80s

Shine On
Michael

[pete1951]

Yes, I have done the same. I used a high output humbucker and it worked fine.
Pete
PS: this will only work on brass/German silver cover plates. I think a steel cover plate disrupt the signal.

[snakehips]

Hi there !

YEARS ago - like 20yrs ago, plus, I saw a blues acoustic duo (trying to remember the name) but the guy played a NRP Style O and he had attached one of those wooden Dean Markley soundhole magnetic pickups to the inside of his coverplate. I asked him about it - and that's what he said he used.
He said the signal was weak so he had to boost it a lot, which added a lot of hiss/noise.
It sounded alright to me - so, unsure which pickup model he had, I bought the black painted, humbucker version of the Dean Markley pickup, thinking it would have less noise to start with - and attached it to the underside of my NRP Delphi. All I did was use 4 small screws - and screw into the wood of the pickup front, through the coverplate sieve holes. Just about the only way you could tell a pickup was there was by the 4 small screws in the coverplate.
NB. I had to drill a hole in the side of the resonator well, to feed the pickup cable into the guitar body, then drill a jack socket hole in the side of the guitar.
I think I still have that pickup - I removed it because I got virtually no sound out of the pickup - and I assume it was because my Delphi had a steel body (and coverplate), versus the Style O's brass body/coverplate.

If anyone is interested in buying my pickup, let me know. The 4 screw-holes near the corners of the pickup top will already be perfectly aligned with coverplate sieve holes ! Possibly by sanding down some of the wooden pickup's wooden cover, you could bring the pickup component closer to the strings (but you might run out of wood to put the screws into - but maybe not - I'll need to fish out the pickup from my "spare pickups" box and have a good look at it again.

I'm pretty sure Bottleneck John did something similar with his brass-bodied resonator mandolin, a few years back.

[pete1951]

Here is my ‘hidden’ pickup idea from a few years ago..........