Conn’s R-B Electronic Pick-up

I saw something very interesting on eBay last night. It was something that I had never heard of before. Have you ever heard of Conn’s R-B electronic pick-up that was intended for use on all wind instruments?

Source: ANTIQUE~GRAPHIQUE on eBay.com

Unless you’ve been in a coma since the 1960s  😉 , you should have heard of Selmer’s Varitone, and quite possibly the Buescher Varitone, as well as the Vox systems that were utilized by King and Beaugnier. However, from the research that I have done, Conn’s R-B electronic pick-up was a bit more obscure.

Now I freely admit I’m not really a gear head. True, I do have a lot of saxophones, and yes, out of necessity I also have an amplification system. What I have though is not antiquated like the Varitone, Vox, or this R-B electronic pick-up. My system is relatively modern, and very digital.

I do have a fascination with the older, analogue systems of sound amplification and modification, so this morning I decided to see if I could find out something about Conn’s R-B electronic pick-up. A rather cursory Google search turned up only one reference to this Conn system. It came from the September 9, 1967 edition of Billboard magazine.

In the following article written by Bruce Weber about the amplified instrument market, he writes about the premier of Conn’s Multi-Vider, which put it in direct competition with Varitone and Vox.

Now this made sense, the Conn Multi-Vider is a much more common piece of vintage saxophone electronica. Here’s an ad for the unit from 1968…

Source: ANTIQUE~GRAPHIQUE on eBay.com

If you’d like to see what they looked like in real life, Doctor Sax has a couple on his site. The first is perhaps the first made—at least based on its serial number. The other came with its manual, pickup, two pickup port grommets, plugs, cords, power supply and original shipping box.

The Multi-Vider ad above doesn’t state if the “American-made microphone with moisture-resistant stainless steel diaphragm” is Conn’s R-B electronic pick-up, or a variation on it, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t be.