Pickups & Microphones on traditional Chinese instruments

[Rotten Deadite]

I've got a Chinese Guqin. It's an amazing instrument, and I say that without reservation. But it's got a few problems when it comes to recording and live performance.

It's really, really quiet. The sound holes are located underneath the instrument, and it doesn't exactly have a huge amount of sound chamber to begin with. Also it isn't tuned terribly high in pitch, so in a way it's a lot like playing a semi-hollow fretless bass without an amp. If you point an SM57 at it, you get basically nothing until you crank the gain on the input all the way up, and even then it's still barely there, hiding inside all the hissing from my preamp

A condenser microphone works better (in my case an AT2020) but again the gain has to be so far up that I have to hold my breath during some of the quieter moments otherwise you'll hear me wheezing on the recording

Clearly such a sensitive microphone would just lead to feedback hell in a live performance.

So I'm thinking about putting a piezo mic on the instrument. A piezo bridge is out of the question, but there's these contact microphones that look like they might work well.

The problem is: those kinds of mics are built for instruments that are much louder and use much thinner wood, which I assume vibrates more. Would this kind of microphone work with an instrument like mine? Or would I again end up with a near-silent signal?

[Augminished]

Wow sick instrument.

How expensive is the instrument? Would you mind routing it? If you could install an acoustic pickup it might work. I would try the contact microphone if you don't want to do this. You could also try this LR Baggs Hex Individual Acoustic Pickups (Set of 6) | GuitarCenter not sure if they work like a piezo. They look the same but thought I should throw it up anyway.

It seems like a difficult instrument to mic and all the images on google are of people playing in the forest

[Trespass]

I've personally used the Schertler stuff, and it's utterly fantastic (but very expensive).

[Augminished]

^ that is some cool stuff. Might have to look into that. Thanks

[Rotten Deadite]

The Schertler Basik looks like it might do the trick. I can order it from Amazon which means I might be able to get some kind of a return policy if it completely fails to do anything good.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. Any recommendations on placement for this kind of thing? I figured it'd just come down to a lot of experimentation, but I have a tendency to develop extreme cases of "miracle ear."

[Baelzebeard]

If you can try out a shotgun mic it might work. They are very, very directional, and close micing is very good at rejecting off axis sounds.