DiMarzio Black Angel Review
Assuming you’re a guitar player, when you hear the name DiMarzio, what images does it conjure up in your mind? If you’re like most people, you associate DiMarzio pickups with the words along the lines of metal or shred, but did you know DiMarzio also makes acoustic pickups?
New for 2015 is the Black Angel pickup. I just received my evaluation pickup in the mail last week and being a guy who doesn’t own an acoustic, I decided to do the next best thing. Borrow one! But not just any acoustic, I ended up using a 1970’s Gibson Dove that belonged to a client of mine. It originally had a LR Baggs M1 passive sound hole pickup which is what the Black Angel is going to be compared against.
If you’re an acoustic guitar player or have looked into acoustic pickups, the name LR Baggs is probably going to sound very familiar as they are produce some of the finest acoustic pickups out there, so the DiMarzio Black Angel is going up against some seriously tough competition
THE PICKUP
There’s nothing really too fancy about the Black Angel. It came with a cable with a switchcraft ¼” jack to plug in a regular cable with. But since the pickup used the same cable as the LR Baggs pickup it was replacing, I just kept the existing cable.
One thing I did notice though, was that even though it was a passive pickup, there was this little switch on the side of the pickup which turned out to be a phase switch. This is really handy when I gotta deal with feedback. How much of a difference it has in tone, I’m not too sure, but I’ll have to test it.
INSTALLATION
Seeing that this is a vintage Gibson Dove I’m messing around with and since it’s not exactly my guitar, I decided to just run the wire externally. The original LR Baggs pickup was also installed that way so swapping it was easy. The pickups were swapped several times back and forth to provide a better test so I’m VERY glad that swapping the pickups were fast.
The Rig
At first I was thinking of just plugging it into a proper acoustic amp, PA or keyboard amp... but since I didn’t have any of those around, I had it tested through a midget Marshall stack. While this isn’t the most ideal setup, if you’re like me and most electric guitar players I know, running an acoustic into an electric guitar amp for a gig is pretty normal since it’s only going to be used for a single song or even just part of a song. It works, it’s all I care. The mids on the EQ were already reduced to flatten out the signal when testing with the LR Baggs. Ultimately, I’m judging the quality of the pickup against the LR Baggs which is already an awesome acoustic pickup.
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
After getting the pickup installed, I plugged the guitar in and just played a couple of open chords in the first position. The first thing I noticed was a very natural sounding tone, almost like the guitar was being mic’d. The highs came out nice and everything was very well balanced. It wasn’t boomy, it was noiseless and it didn’t produce any of the annoying squeaky string noise when shifting chords. Overall, it sounds great. It wasn’t so awe inspiring that it made me want to switch from playing electric to acoustic exclusively but it was a great tone none the less. I didn’t think it was any better or worse than the LR Baggs M1 it replaced.
Before I swapped the pickups back again, I decided to flick the phase switch on the pickup. With the phase switch flipped over, the tone became louder and fuller sounding. All the highs were still there but the bottom end just filled so much more. Clearly the midget Marshall stack was out of phase before or something but the tone it now had really showed that this pickup was really a solid contender when it comes to sound hole pickups for acoustic. As I wanted to keep listening to the Black Angel, I decided to switch back to the original pickup for a comparison.
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL
Switching back to the original LR Baggs pickup, the first thing I noticed was that the M1 wasn’t as loud and there was a lack of highs that was present with the Black Angel. The bottom end was bigger on the LR Baggs but it had this boomy muffled vibe going. While it had a great rhythm tone, it just didn’t have the top end the Black Angel did. Needless to say, the original pickup came off pretty quick.
THE BLACK ANGEL RETURNS
With the Black Angel back in again. The amp was cranked as high as it would get to see if it would feedback. The LR Baggs M1 like a lot of acoustics has feedback issues and I wanted to see how well the phase switch would work. However, I couldn’t get the thing to feedback! Even with the switch on both positions, the pickup didn’t squeal which was a definite plus in my book. I don’t know what kind of magic DiMarzio did but there was clearly some sort of magic going on in that pickup!!
FINAL THOUGHTS
I’m not going to lie, like most people, DiMarzio isn’t a name that comes to me when I think about acoustic pickups, but after testing out the Black Angel, I’m actually seriously inclined to recommend them over a lot of other brands. The tone was nicely balanced with all the strings coming out nice and clear. The phase switch on the pickup is a real nice bonus. Even though I wasn’t able to get the guitar to feedback during testing, I know for a fact that just being able to switch the phase of the signal is going to kill any feedback that gets picked up on stage. Being on stage and having to deal with feedback sucks, with this, it’s just a flick of a switch on the pickup which is really easy to get to.
The only downside? The black soundhole pickup didn’t quite look as nice the cream LR Baggs pickup it replaced. But looks aside, I think this is quite the winner.
The LR Baggs M1 soundhole pickup isn’t an easy pickup to compete against but the DiMarzio Black Angel is definitely able to keep up with it. I’m pretty sure there are going to be people who would argue which one is better but so far to my ears the DiMarzio Black Angel has the LR Baggs M1 beat. Heck, I actually had the owner of the guitar test the pickup and she liked it enough to want to keep it in there for her show in a couple of weeks. Maybe she can get the thing to feedback. Either way, I’ll get you her opinion of it after she bashes around with it on stage in front of about 8,000 people.
-Budd
