We now offer the X1 with the optional pickup system from Helpinstill built in! This provides an immense range of possibilities to record, amplify, and experiment with your Keybird.

This is your gateway to have the beautiful acoustic sound of the Keybird “à la naturel” and have the opportunity to have a digital signal out.

The Helpinstill pickups provide a wide variety of setups and sounds, and we made sure they can also bring you the unique characteristics of the Keybird sound.

Also, if you’re handy with the odd allen key, you can further customize the sound of the pickups, altering the distance between the pickup magnets and the strings.

15-25mm distance

Have a listen to the sound quality of the pickups at a larger distance from the strings (15mm-20mm on the high strings pickup and 20-25mm on the lower strings)

Take note that this requires a bit higher gain on your recording/amplifier device, which might result in minimal noise, depending on the device.
Notice how much we can preserve the natural qualities of the Keybird sound!

8-20mm distance

Now let’s change up the timbre of the sound by moving the Helpinstill closer to the strings…This process takes about 5 minutes and requires a single 4mm allen key, 2 screws for each pickup. We are at around 8mm-15mm on the high pickup, and 10-15mm on the lows.

This sounds a bit closer to a guitar, but also quite pleasant with the soft thump of the hammers. Perhaps you can hear the Rhodes and Wurlitzer qualities

Going experimental…

So, moving further on and elaborating on the possibilities that are opened to us through the digitalization of the Keybird’s acoustic sound, we hooked up some digital signal processing in the form of guitar pedal emulations, and these are the different sounds we got:

Yep, so all those sounds come from the same instrument, which could be your Keybird! Don’t worry if you didn’t have a chance to get your X1 with the pickups installed, just reach out to us, and we got your back!

Stay tuned and look out for more audio experiments with the Keybird x Helpinstill!