

I like the fact that it's easy to use and it's generally pretty responsive to dynamics. I use it with my Takamine and it works great. It definitely comes in handy for those who like to play live and would rather not shell out the cash for an acoustic-electric guitar. I have been using the Dean Markley Promag Single Coil acoustic guitar pickup for about 3 years now. I (very fortunately) managed to sell this pickup for the $50 I paid and learned my lesson. It's like putting a blanket over your guitar to completely deaden the sound, and then, just like a blanket, this pickup has no controls to adjust your tone, so again what you see is what you get. In closing, this is a terrible example of an acoustic pickup. it made my $1,000 Larrivee sound like a $100 guitar from Wal-Mart when it was plugged in. Not impressive as an acoustic pickup at all. This isn't helped by the fact that it has no controls to adjust it. Basically a dead sound that has no brightness or overtones. The closest comparison I have is plugging an electric guitar into a cheap, small amplifier, using the neck pickup and rolling the tone completely off. It basically sounded like a very dead, muffled, and generally un-natural tone that was not pleasing to the ear. The tones from this pickup could be characterized as anything but acoustic sounding. This produced a pretty terrible sound, but even when I was later able to try it through a Fender Acoustasonic Junior amplifier, it really didn't sound much better.

Another problem was that I didn't have the budget for a proper acoustic amplifier or sound system to run into for a purer signal, so I had no choice but to run into electric amps.
DEAN MARKLY EXTERNAL PICKUP INSTALL
All adjustments for the sound or output level coming from the pickup have to be done from the amp, and while it's nice not to have to drill into the guitar to install controls, not having ANYTHING to adjust is a major pain. No volume, no tones, no equalization sliders, etc.

There are no controls for this pickup whatsoever. It's basically a single coil pickup that slips into the soundhole of your acoustic guitar and from there, a long cable with a 1/4" plug on the end of it protrudes out so that you can plug it right into an amplifier.
DEAN MARKLY EXTERNAL PICKUP PRO
The only thing I could get within that price range was the Dean Markley Pro Mag. However, I only had a budget of about $50.
