Harley Benton HB-T

I bought this for my yamaha guitarlele. I've wanted a microphone that you can attach to your instrument without making any bigger operations (e.g. drilling a hole in the body to fix a cable terminal). I decided the try this little microphone because of its price and the easy way to fix it. I can only report what my experiences has been while using it with my yamaha guitarlele...

1. sound

The Sound is okay. I think it's a little thin but that is what I'd expected anyways. However for live perfomances it's absolutely okay. It's an easy way to mike up an acoustic intstrument if you don't want to or cannot use a diaphragm microphone.
I'm standing while playing the guitarlele so it's a little bit disturbing to have a microphone postioned in front of your instrument

2. quality

To be honest I had expected a little more even if the price is that low.
I attached the cable terminal with a tape so that i could not move anymore and the cable was not under tensile strength. After playing the third time there has been a loose contact. Maybe this was just bad luck and another one would have better quality i don't know.

All in all I would say that this is a cheap solution for someone who's looking for an easy and fast way to mike up his acoustic instrument for some live shows.

This little pickup I bought for my double bass. I needed one passive pickup for the clicks ( slap) sounds when playing rockabilly. I have mounted it on the backside of the fingerboard and it picks up the slap clicks just great.

The important thing here is not to get the sound too bassy because the slappin sounds are not in the same frequency range as the ordinary bass tones. This pickup manages to catch the right acoustic color of the fingerboard slap sounds.
It has enough of trebles and some of the nice smooth middle tones you want to have.
The construction is very simple and it works just great. Just a nice jack contact and you connect it straight to the mixing console.
In many situations the bass player don't want to have those clicks through the amp because the bass speakers wont produce the right sound. But if you line out it to the PA it gives you another dimension. The one you were missing when only using amp and speaker.
I have no negative experience with it whatsoever. It is little, practical, simple, and works like a dream.
It feels kind of plastic but if it was made of metal it might scratch your instrument.
The color is perfect and it blends easy with all kind of colors, but above all it blends perfectly to my ebony fingerboard.

When I was researching about contact pick ups I found this one to be accessible enough for the basics of a contact mic but without expecting much from it.

After several trials in different acoustic instrument I have to say that the sound quality is around OK but don't expect a great quality, specially because I tried to record a guitar and the was almost nothing sounding, it took me to level up the gain as much as possible to capture some decent sound, the bad thing here is the increase of noise you get when recording with so much gain, so in that sense is not the best experience and result.

I also did some experiments with this pick up attaching it to small percussion instruments and tried to get some samples and it was ok but nothing too clean, for more experimental things can be fun to use because of the noisy background you can get and if you are the type of user who likes to improvise.

I would say that to amplify acoustic instruments for a simple live session can be handy but nothing too elaborate, if you want also to do some experimental recordings (surfaces, unusual sound sources, etc) can be also handy without much expectations.

This is a very good pickup! I am using it on my saz (baglama), which is a Turkish string instrument and the sound quality was much better than I expected it to be. Also, it was very easy to put it on the instrument, I had to move it around to see where it would sound best and when that was done, it sounded perfect!

However, I noticed that if I play a string and then leave it, the sound will not fade out smoothly, it will sound like something is lagging for a short while and then, it will be completely quiet.

Also, after a while, it felt like the pickup loosened up a little bit, which changed the sound that I got, but after pressing it towards the instrument again, it was fine. Maybe I just didn't press it hard enough.

To summarize this, it is great pickup for a great price!

I am using this one to get some "acoustic" sounds out from electric instruments (guitars and basses). It's not really something you would recommend when doing things by the book, but it can have yield some interesting results. Quite frankly, contact mics can be pretty bad, and this really isn't. I would definitely recommend getting one.

The adhesive provided in the kit works perfectly. I have the impression it won't leave any stains on the wood, but so far I haven't tried on my 'matte' instruments. It's very easy to install, although if you have never done this before it might require some tweaking around to find your instrument's sweet spot.

As I am mostly using the sound from the mic blended with the original electric sound, the signal chain I use is very simple, and I connect it straight to one of the inputs on my audio interface. From there it is very easy to adjust the levels and add any effect you wish through Logic or any other DAW.

I could notice that the mic works very well, with very little noise and quite a good volume. I definitely recommend it, even as an impulse buy. It is definitely making my recordings more interesting!