Archive for the ‘acoustic guitar amp’ Category
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 »
Acoustic Guitar Amplifiers
One piece of acoustic guitar gear you will definitely want to consider is an acoustic guitar amplifier (“amp”). If you’ll be performing in any venue larger than your living room or back porch, you will probably need to amplify your acoustic guitar if you want it to be heard. It is possible to use an electric guitar amp, or the house PA. However, if you want to get a truly faithful reproduction of your acoustic guitar, while at the same time minimizing feedback, you’ll want a dedicated acoustic guitar amplifier.
The clean channel on an electric guitar amp might be acceptable if you’re playing your acoustic guitar with a band, and you just want to cut through the mix. However, the electric guitar amps will probably sound too tinny, as the high frequencies will be more prominent than the mids and lows. In fact, a keyboard amp will probably offer a more faithful reproduction of the acoustic guitar, since it is designed to reproduce a greater range of frequencies.
There are now a number of acoustic guitar amplifiers available on the market. Most include at least two channels, at least one of which will support an XLR, or microphone, cable. This allows you to combine the signal from an acoustic guitar pickup with that of a microphone. With the two-channel configuration, it is also possible to use the acoustic guitar amp as a mini-PA for solo acoustic performers, using one channel for the acoustic guitar, and the second channel for a vocal microphone. Some amplifiers have built-in effects, such as reverb, EQ, etc. Read the rest of this entry »