Fishman Rare Earth

At the 2008 Winter NAMM show, Fishman introduced completely redesigned versions of the Rare Earth single-coil and humbucking models. Physically, the two pickups share the same black, moulded, slimline casing, and in the absence of any legending the only way you'll be able to tell them apart is that the humbucking version has a volume control mounted externally on its base, next to the holder for the twin camera-type batteries.

The casing itself has been re-drawn to give a smoother, more rounded appearance when fitted to the guitar, and looks a good bit more attractive and organic than the original design. The mounting clamps have been quite subtly modified and the lower, movable part now sits in a little channel that keeps it in perfect alignment, no matter what. This may sound like no big deal, but it actually means that mounting the new Rare Earth pickups in the soundhole of your guitar is a much easier operation than in many other cases. As with the original design, the Rare Earth's slimline form means that you can fit and remove them without having to slacken off strings — a major boon if you're in a hurry, having arrived late at a gig.

Fishman have always struck me as a company that really knows their customers and they prove it again with these Rare Earth pickups, where the jack socket sitting on the end of the 2m output cable is actually an endpin jack in a little plastic sleeve. Again, this might not seem much, but the fact that you don't have to shell out for an additional endpin jack saves a little bit of inconvenience and cash.

The redesign of these Fishman Rare Earth pickups, while leaving well alone the neodymium magnets that give them their signature sound, has extended into the preamp electronics, where a new low-current design means that you now get more than 240 hours of playing time from one set of batteries. Instead of the twin miniature 1.5V camera-type batteries mentioned earlier, you also have the option of using a single 3V alternative, and, personally, I'd tend towards that simply because at a gig I don't want to have to fiddle with the little ones. Plugging a lead into the captive output jack switches on power to the pickup's integral preamp in the conventional manner. As in previous incarnations, the preamp retains its low-noise, high-fidelity audio design and is designed to run into an instrument amplifier, an unbalanced mixer input or a DI box. It will happily handle cable runs of up to 25m (80ft) without any loss of signal quality.

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