“Ironically, the quest for a natural sound increasingly meant filling a guitar with wires, batteries and circuit boards”: The challenge of amplifying our acoustics has been one of guitar’s great challenges over the decades – are we nearly there yet?

Fingerstylist Andy McKee uses a K+K Pure pickup system in his custom Greenfield acoustic as he performs here in 2018.

The first time I had a pickup fitted to an acoustic guitar was a disaster. I didn’t know any better.

It was an instrument that I loved and I had been looking forward to an amp’d up version of its voice, maybe a splash of reverb, some delay – keeping it tasteful, of course. Instead, what I got was the malignantly ugly quack and logarithmic anti-dynamic range of a primitive under-saddle pickup. Marvellous.