Internationally: The Rolling Stones, U2, Bonnie Raitt, David Lindley, Jackson Browne, Ry Cooder, Richard Thompson, Emmylou Harris, Leo Cocker, William Ackerman, Peter Finger, Ben Harper, and others.In Japan, Sunrise is a magnetic pickup brand favored by renowned artists such as Isato Nakagawa, Shun Komatsubara, Toshiro Masuda, Masaji Otsuka, Masaaki Kishibe, Ginji Ogawa, and Kotaro Oshio.
Jim Kaufman began working as a repair technician at a shop in Los Angeles in 1978 and went independent in ’84 to open his own guitar repair shop. Having long been dissatisfied with the frequency response of piezo pickups—which he found too bright in the low and high frequencies—and having fallen in love with the sound of magnetic pickups, he completed the prototype of the Sunrise magnetic pickup in ’78.It came close to his ideal—"a magnetic pickup with a high feedback threshold (the point at which feedback or resonance occurs due to speaker interference) that still retains the guitar’s tonal character"—but he apparently couldn’t eliminate the noise that is inherent to pickups.After several years of research, he succeeded in suppressing the noise by properly grounding the pickup internally, and it was not until the late 1980s that the design settled on its current specifications.
■ Sunrise S-2
Suggested Retail Price: 50,400 yen
There was another important factor behind the completion of the Sunrise pickup. As a guitar repairman, Jim counted renowned musicians such as Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Dan Fogelberg, Stephen Stills, and David Crosby among his clients, which gave him the opportunity to have them test the products he created.
A magnetic pickup uses magnetism and coils to convert the sound of an acoustic guitar into an electrical signal. The principle is that the vibration (sound) of the all-metal strings generates an electric current (electrical signal) in the coil, which is then output; needless to say, individual variations arise depending on the material of the magnet used, as well as the thickness and number of windings of the coil wrapped around it.Unlike mass-produced, standardized products from many brands, Sunrise pickups are entirely handmade by Jim himself to ensure consistent quality.
Another notable characteristic of their sound is their high-precision bass reproduction. In particular, they powerfully reproduce the sound of dropped bass strings and excel at capturing even the vibrations of the soundboard—which is likely the main reason they are so popular among fingerstyle players who frequently use alternative tunings.