Archive for January, 2011
Crafting Your Signature Acoustic Guitar Sound
This article will discuss why you want to craft your own signature acoustic guitar sound, and how to begin planning and designing your own acoustic guitar rig. Let’s start by taking a look at a couple of common scenarios.
Scenario One: You’ve rehearsed for your upcoming performance dozens of times at home, in your living room or basement. Your acoustic guitar sounds amazing, whether you’re strumming with a pick or playing fingerstyle. You arrive at the venue, plug your acoustic guitar into the house p.a., or electric guitar amplifier, and hit the first chord of your opening number. You’re shocked to hear the sound blasting back at you through the monitor, sounding absolutely nothing like the beautiful, natural acoustic tone you’ve been hearing at home. What happened?
Scenario Two: You strum through that folk song or acoustic rock standard, and the guitar sounds great through the house amplification. The crowd loves it and you’re feeding off that energy. Then you kick into your favorite fingerstyle piece, and you can barely distinguish between the mish-mash of frequencies coming out of the monitor. The sound is so muddy that you have trouble hearing your guitar parts. You get distracted and lose the confidence you had just a few minutes ago. How do you solve this problem?
First, let’s identify the cause of the problem. Each acoustic guitar is unique, as is the playing style of each individual guitarist. And each guitarist may use several playing styles, each requiring different gear settings to produce the ideal tone. If you leave it up to the house sound engineer, you are taking your chances. And chances are he won’t get it right. Read the rest of this entry »