I confess I have a love of pickups. Let me give you the case for pickups, and what you should be prepared for with either pickups or mics if you play out a lot.
To start, I am both a sound person and a musician.
As a sound person pickups are a lot easier to work with, as long as they aren’t cheapies that quack like a duck. The most common problem is dead batteries in active pickups. Another common problem is guitar players with preamp pedals that don’t know what the preamp knobs do, and do stuff like turn the treble all the way up or down. It’s vital to identify those during a sound check.
To dial in a musician’s sound I make the musicians play solo, without amping, and then dial in the sound so they come out the mains sounding true to their tone. It’s a simple A/B comparison.
I find that kind of fixup is needed regardless of whether it’s a mic or a pickup. I’ve had violins that came in too hot on the treble side when micd, and dialing them back slightly reproed their sweet acoustic tone.
I’ve had musicians move mics on stage during a set because they didn’t like where it was, and I had to emergency fix the balance, but if they moved it too far away, they were lost, as I couldn’t bring them back without getting feedback.
I’ve had singers with mics on stands that liked to sway as they sing, and they fade in and out as they do it. Mandolins work the same way if you move too much. The good singers know to ‘eat’ the mic, but you can’t put a mic 1" from a mandolin or a violin, there is too much motion going on.
I use high-pass, parametric and shelving EQ as my main tools. And compressor is my 3rd most used tool. In a band setting, your soft notes will get lost if you are balanced for the loud stuff, a compressor (very gentle compression, 2x just little on top) evens that out a bit. It takes some practice and some know-how, but it help all the subtle stuff that usually gets lost come out a bit more. We have great musicians, it always irks me when they play fantastically but nobody hears it. My job as a sound guy is to make everybody heard, in as musical a way as possible.
As a mandolinist I bought a pedal that has all my fave tools in it. (zoom MS-60B is the only cheap one I could find). I find most sound guys in a five minute sound check can’t do as good a job as I can with hours at home to fiddle around.
IMHO a mic, can in theory, give you a better sound, in a perfectly controlled environment.
- works best with very low stage volumes or a recording booth.
- best when you remain perfectly still.
- is best when there are relatively few musicians being miced, that’s the stage volume thing again.
- longer sound checks to get the mics dialed in, and people told not to move or fiddle with the mics, etc.
- an acoustically powerful (read expensive) instrument is better with mics because it will overpower the background noise a bit better.
In less controlled environments, pickups will excel.
- you can move around and your sound stays the same.
- background noise won’t come through your pickup as much as it will through a mic.
- a pedal with some EQ can fix up pickup oddities so your dialed-in sound goes to the board every time, regardless of board or environment or sound person competence.
- you can use a looper pedal to listen to yourself in the mains - this is priceless for adjusting your sound, and working with a sound person.
- effects (like gentle compression) are useful in a church setting.
- a mid level instrument is indistinguishable from many high-end instruments with a pickup, because acoustic power is irrelevant, yes this is heresy, but it is still true This makes additional options available for what instrument you gig with.
Blugrassers are generally acoustic purists, and will use mics (I could have just said this and skipped this post I guess), same for studios, many other folks use pickups, depends entirely on your environment.
All my mandos have pickups, but I will use mic or pickup as the venue calls for.
So, choose between gearhead, or acoustic purist. If you don’t want to worry about the gear, use a mic, and learn to work with one like singers do. If you want consistent good sound across multiple environments and various sound people, get a pickup, and learn to send a good processed sound to the board, thus relying on the sound person primarily for balance.
Yes, Sierra Hull has been known to play with a pickup when it’s a large band and she wants to move around. If she can do it, so can you.