The Rochester Guitar Club

Hi, this is edwin dingal asking for help about guitar pre amps, effects pedals, etc. I just bought a boss AD-8 pedal for acoustic guitar and cost me for $295 and still not satisfied with the output of it. can i ask what should i buy to enhance the sound of my guitar out of my ordinary acoustic amp. tnx!

External EQs are nice and that's a well featured one, but perhaps you are not capturing what you want at the pickup. Many people use a combination of under saddle pickup plus a mike and a blender to vary the balance between the two. I'm thinking about doing this to my Taylor 810. I had a Fishman Matrix Natural II put in a few years back and use a Fishman external Pro EQ. But I'm still not satisfied because there is so much complex sound this guitar provides that the Fishman alone is not picking up. Look to your pickup if you can't get the sound you want ( and the guitar has it when unplugged ).

I tend to agree with the pickup asessment. I have had a lot of luck with my K&K Pure Western. It is not a piezo (which picks up vibrations under the saddle) or a magnetic (which picks up vibrations via magnetic field). It is a transducer that is glued to the underside of your bridge plate. It picks up the vibrations from the flexable soundboard, not the rigid saddle. And it does so without the need for string pressure, giving it what I believe to be the best of both worlds. Also, it's a passive system and has a high enough output that it does not require a preamp (although you can use one if you like). The only necessary modification to your guitar is to drill for the endpin jack. It is very receptive to effects. I personally think that modulation effects are universal for acoustic and electric instruments. Reverb, chorus, delay, and stuff like that. What will work and sound good for one should work for the other. On the other hand, wah-wahs, distortion, and things like that I think are better suited to electrics. You don't need an "acoustic-specific" processor. That's just my take on it. Hope that helps.

I've got the iBeam Active on my Parkwood... best thing I ever did to that guitar for sure. It's kinda like what mark was talking about, but placement is EVERYTHING!

One extra point I might mention is that sometimes, at some venues, the sound guy will have feedback issues with under-saddle pickups because they are most likely microphone based. I have had trouble fighting feedback with three different guitars at my (former) open mike - One I know was a Baggs with 6 separate transducers on a Taylor, another an old Gibson but I don't know the pickup brand, just that it feeds back at what I assume is the resonant frequency of the guitar body (lower bout). The third had both piezo and mike based pickups and a fader built in - which allowed the cure by backing off on the under-saddle. They were very difficult to work with because they were sensitive to the player position relative to both the monitors and house speakers, and they were on very tonally resonant guitars. Actually a drawback to have a good guitar sometimes. In fact Doyle Dykes said he chose a thinner body profile and maple all around for his signature model Taylor (DDSM) because it was much more tolerant onstage - because it was not as resonant. Guess that also explains why he's lost a lot of his hearing. It was really loud at the HOG where he did the presentation.