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.
This is certainly not to suggest that house sound engineers are incompetent – most I’ve worked with have been very experienced professionals. However, unless you’re working with the same sound crew every night, the engineers are not likely to know how you expect your acoustic guitar to sound.
The sound engineer has his own idea of how an acoustic guitar should sound. He is working with a number of different instruments and playing styles, and there’s no one-setting-fits-all that he can dial up to suit every player’s unique tastes and expectations. Even if he gets it right for part of your set, if you’re alternating between different playing styles, at the very least you may require different EQ settings. If the engineer is not familiar with your setlist, dialing up the correct settings will require time, even if he is able to eventually get it right. Therefore, if you want to achieve the signature acoustic guitar sound you’re striving for, YOU need to take control!
The best way to take control is to get your own gear, build your own rig, and familiarize yourself with that gear. Most electric guitar players wouldn’t jump up on an unfamiliar stage, hand the sound engineer his instrument cable, and hope for the best. No way! The typical electric guitarist spends a considerable amount of time educating himself, learning his equipment, and crafting his own unique sound.
As an acoustic guitarist, you can do the same. You will need to learn some basic information about pickups, preamps, effects and processors, and acoustic guitar amplifiers. Of course, if you are in a professional act, working with the same sound crew night after night, you can work as a team to get that ideal acoustic guitar tone. For the rest of us, we need to learn and perfect this aspect of our craft.
Over the next several months, Acoustic Guitar Gear will present a series of articles on the various aspects of crafting your signature acoustic guitar sound, for both recording and live performance situations. We will discuss selecting a pickup versus a microphone, or using a combination of the two. We will look at the various components of the “signal chain”, including acoustic guitar preamps, effects and processors, acoustic guitar amplifiers, combo amps, EQ settings, and speaker cabinets. Please be sure to visit often for helpful and informative articles on each of these topics.