Archive for the ‘acoustic guitar effects processors’ 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 »
Effects and Processors for Acoustic Guitars
With the right pickup and/or microphone, combined with a great acoustic guitar amp (or PA or recording console), it is certainly possible to faithfully reproduce the sound of your acoustic guitar on stage or in the studio. However, in some situations you may want to modify, add to, or completely alter the natural tone of your acoustic guitar. If you’re playing a long set that features only your acoustic guitar and vocals, you may want to keep things interesting by adding some variations in your acoustic guitar tone for particular songs. When you’re playing with a band, you may want to modify the tone of your acoustic guitar to better blend in with the other instruments, or to cut through a busy mix. When recording in the studio, you may want to create the illusion of playing in a large concert hall, or use your acoustic guitar to sound more like an electric guitar or other instrument.
For these and other tone modifications, you can use effects and/or processors, some of which are designed specifically for use with acoustic guitars. This article presents a brief overview of some of the effects and processors that are commonly used with acoustic guitars. Future articles will look at each of these components in greater detail, including reviews and comparisons of the acoustic guitar gear available on the market today.
In this article, the terms “effects” and “processors” will be used interchangeably. Technically speaking, however, effects are distinguishable from processors as follows: an “effect” is added to the original signal, whereas a “processor” alters the original signal. When using an effect, such as reverb or echo, the original signal is heard along with the effected signal. On the other hand, when using processors such as EQs, phase shifters, and compressors, the processed signal is heard without the original signal.