Overseas, the Rolling Stones, U2, Bonnie Raitt, David Lindley, Jackson Browne, Ry Cooder, Richard Thompson, Emmylou Harris, Leo Cocke, William Ackerman, Peter Finger, Ben Harper, and others. Sunrise is a brand of magnetic pickups used in Japan by famous artists such as Isato Nakagawa, Shun Komatsubara, Toshiro Masuda, Masaji Otsuka, Shinmei Kishibe, Ginji Ogawa, and Kotaro Oshio.
Jim Kaufman started working as a repairman at a store in Los Angeles in 1978, and opened his own guitar repair store in 1984. He had always had a problem with the bright but low-high frequency response of piezo PUs and fell in love with the sound of magnetic PUs. It was close to his ideal "a magnetic PU with a high feedback threshold (the point where feedback and resonance occur due to speaker interference), yet without losing the sonic character of the guitar," but it could not eliminate the noise that is inherent in PUs. However, it was not able to cancel out the noise that is inherent in PUs. After several years of research, they succeeded in suppressing the noise by grounding the PU in an appropriate manner, and settled on the current specifications in the late '80s.
Sunrise S-2
Reference list price: 50,400 yen
There was another important factor behind the completion of the Sunrise PU. As a repairman, Jim had the opportunity to have famous musicians such as Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Dan Vogelberg, Stephen Stills, and David Crosby try out the products he made. He had the opportunity to have his products tested by these musicians.
Magnetic PUs use magnetism and coils to convert the sound of an acoustic guitar into an electrical signal, and the vibration (sound) of the strings generates an electric current (electrical signal) in the coil, which is then output. Unlike the mass-produced standard products of many brands, Sunrise is entirely handmade by Jim himself to ensure quality.
Another characteristic of Sunrise's sound is its high-precision bass reproduction. In particular, it reproduces the sound of dropped bass strings powerfully and has excellent response to pick up even the top vibration, which is probably the biggest reason why it is favored by fingerpickers who use irregular tuning a lot.