Live Acoustic Guitar Sound Question...

  • Thread starter Thread starter chrisharris
  • Start date Start date
chrisharris

chrisharris

King of Bling
Hi. This will be sort of a long post, but I may not be able to check this thread for a few days, so I wanted to give as much information as possible. This should probably be in The Rack, but I'm asking about live sound, not recording, so I thought I'd have a better shot here.

Okay, I've played live for quite awhile, and I've almost exclusively played an acoustic guitar with a full band. The way I do it, the best I can hope for is to hear some degee of the high end out of the guitar without getting massive feedback. See, when I say "acoustic," I'm talking about an acoustic-electric played through a tubescreamer or other front end distortion and a Roland Jazz Chorus...it sounds like amplified ass, but it actually (sort of) works for what I do.

I typed that preface so that you would know that despite playing acoustic guitar live for many years, I have almost no experience with getting GOOD live acoustic sounds, which is what I need your help with.

My daughter is now 19 years old. She's recently moved to Austin to pursue music, and she's having some moderate success. On Saturday night, I watched her perform in a theater north of Austin as part of a "songwriters in the round" event with some pretty legit writers. I was happy to see her invited to share the stage with some older, seasoned writers who have penned actual cuts for artists I've actually heard of, lol. :D

But I noticed that she really needs an upgrade in the acoustic sound department. It always starts with the guitar, but she's got some decent instruments that sound fine in a room but that all have that crappy piezo pickup sound, and I'd love it if I could help her improve that sound. Every other performer last night had SOME kind of pedal board involved in their chain, but I couldn't see anything specific.

So I'm asking you knowledgeable folks who play live if you can recommend something to help her improve her live acoustic sound. Just assume it's not the fault of the instrument for purposes of this post. It'd be cool if it had a built in tuner, but that's not vital. It's probably going to be something with compression, EQ, and possibly acoustic guitar modeling, but I'm open to suggestions.

This Boss AD-8 looks promising, but I have no experience with it. Anybody know if the modeling is decent?

I'd REALLY appreciate any suggestions anybody has. I'd like to keep it under $500, but am willing to spend more for something truly special. If you want to hear the kind of stuff she's doing, some of it's here: Jaimee Harris Music

Last thing...I'm not really looking for an "effects" unit, per se. She needs to be able to get a single great guitar sound dialed in, but she doesn't need phasers and distortion and echo chamber delays - (i.e., she's not me, lol...so I'm not looking for some Digitech unit with 50 shitty presets). And it doesn't have to be a single unit...any combination of pedals that works is fine. But I need to stay away from acoustic amps. Most of the places she plays have house PA's and want only a line out from the guitar. She's not going to mic an amp, and if she was going to use the line out from the amp, she's just lugging around a lot of weight for what will essentially be a guitar monitor.

THANK YOU IF YOU PLOWED ALL THE WAY THROUGH THIS. Anybody who replies is helping me with my Christmas shopping, lol.

(Long Post Summary For Greg_L) - I need help with live acoustic guitar processing that helps good acoustic guitars sound great by killing some of the typical "piezo" sound. Not FX, not an acoustic amp...

(Short Post Summary For Greg_L) - This is about acoustic guitars, so why did you open this thread? Move on...
 
If she is playing acoustic guitar, not an AMPLIFIED acoustic guitar, then pedals are totally unnecessary. A tuner is great, but anything else is superfluous if the main soundboard is adjusted correctly. What is needed is a good electric-acoustic guitar with a decent acoustic sound to it. Many brands to choose from, find one whose sound is what you like - have the music store plug it into a non-f/x-ed PA head to try out the sound. Don't use a guitar amp, because then you will be getting the sound of the amp/speaker combo, not the guitar.
 
mjbphotos said:
If she is playing acoustic guitar, not an AMPLIFIED acoustic guitar, then pedals are totally unnecessary. A tuner is great, but anything else is superfluous if the main soundboard is adjusted correctly. What is needed is a good electric-acoustic guitar with a decent acoustic sound to it.
Click to expand...

I appreciate the response, but I disagree. What she WANTS is a mic'd acoustic sound, without having to deal with the feedback issues and lack of consistency in the volume. In my opinion, no matter how good an under the saddle pickup is, it still sounds like ass compared to a mic'd acoustic. If DI'd acoustics sounded awesome, we'd all record that way, right? All the board tweaking in the world won't get the sounds we all love from a straight DI'd acoustic guitar.

Somebody on another forum pointed out this Fishman unit that seems to have it all...I'd love to know if anybody has tried one. The video has several segments, but the live sounds are obviously what impressed me.

http://www.fishman.com/products/details.asp?id=110
 
chrisharris said:
I appreciate the response, but I disagree. What she WANTS is a mic'd acoustic sound, without having to deal with the feedback issues and lack of consistency in the volume. In my opinion, no matter how good an under the saddle pickup is, it still sounds like ass compared to a mic'd acoustic. If DI'd acoustics sounded awesome, we'd all record that way, right? All the board tweaking in the world won't get the sounds we all love from a straight DI'd acoustic guitar.

Somebody on another forum pointed out this Fishman unit that seems to have it all...I'd love to know if anybody has tried one. The video has several segments, but the live sounds are obviously what impressed me.

http://www.fishman.com/products/details.asp?id=110
Click to expand...

I'm using a Fishman Aura system and have been pretty happy with it.
 
I still fit and play Fishman on nearly all my acoustics. As you know an awful lot depends on the board when you play out but Fishman give what I would call a good generic acoustic sound and are pretty good value. Still not the sound of the mic'd guitar but acceptable for most purposes. Easily beats the quack of those under saddle transducers IMHO.

In many ways it's easier to say what to avoid and for me that would be too much in the chain. ANY system that includes a mic in the body or blend thereof. You really need to explore a few systems that the players she likes uses and try and head in that direction. At least as far as your budget will allow.

Any onboard acoustic pickup at best can really only provide a generic sound as you pretty much know. That loud mic'd acoustic sound is kind of the holy grail.
 
Nothing will ever really beat a great mic

But I have found that I can get a pretty good sound from D-Tar pickups and they have some nice prices too!

I would say though that if you want to use that Takamine that I see her lugging around these days....

Try something like either a D-Tar Momma Bear or else something from Fishman...

If you are wanting to use your Larrivee and add on a great sounding pickup try something from from D-Tar on a budget of if you really want to spend $500 go with K&K sound!

My tastes tend to go with magnetic pickups for finger picked stuff and for flat picking I'll just use under saddle.

Tommy Emmanuel uses a rig like this and it sounds amazing! But I really think it's just Tommy :D

http://www.tommyemmanuel.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1836
 
If I were taking the signal straight to the board I would go with K&Ks. Those little disks are surprisingly good.

The D-Tar Mamma Bear and the Fishman Aura are similar technology. I haven't tried the D-tar version, but I imagine it's also good. Rick Turner had a hand in it's developement.

The Aura works by mixing the output of your pickup with an image of a professionally mic'd recording of a guitar similar to the one your playing. At it's best it can make your guitar through an amplifier sound alot like your guitar. At its worst it can usually make your guitar at least sound like an acoustic guitar. I have the full blown preamp version like the one at the top of their website:

http://www.fishmanaura.com/learn/learnindex.asp

and also one guitar with the soundhole version.

http://accessories.musiciansfriend....lipse-Aura-Onboard-Acoustic-Preamp?sku=620758

The full blown preamp is pretty versatile. The in the soundhole version outputs a very low signal which occasionally causes me a problem. Sounds good though.
 
The broad sweep of opinions expressed above suggest that the OP should concentrate more on getting a good pickup system inplace, rather than trying to add a pedal or something to deal with a not so good pick-up system.

I agree.

I also agree that, ultimately, a miked acoustic guitar yeilds a more satisfying sound than a pick up.

However, for live performances with unknown quantities sitting behind the mixing desk, I prefer the security of having a good quality pick-up system, rather than depending on someone's mike locker and mixing skills.

From my perspective as a live mixer, i.e. that 'unknown quantity' behind the desk, I prefer to deal with pick-ups rather than miking a guitar.
 
So this is just what I do, all care but no responsibility...

I also don't like the pickup sound, especially through a PA, and especially where you have an unknown quantity tweaking the knobs. Depending what else is in the line up, I find that the acoustic can disappear in the mix and sound brittle and honky (yo honky!) all that the same time.

So I plug my guitar into an (electric) effects device with stereo outs as I use a bit of delay an reverb and chorus and even distortion occasionally and send one to the PA and the other to my Class A electric guitar amp, which is set to the distortion channel, but without any actually distortion... ie. low gain.

Gives me a sound which isn't all that great on its own but meshes well with the PA sound and fills out the sonic canvas a little. I also find it useful for monitoring what I'm playing.

Now I'm talking small PA obviously, but if I played larger gigs I might consider miking the guitar amp and feeding some of that into the board.

Try it. It's free... haven't had any feedback issues to date, but then I'm not playing particularly loud either.

Cheers
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top