Ditching your onboard preamp...

p90fool · March 2020

Ok, further to a recent discussion on replacing acoustic pickups and without wishing to totally derail someone else's thread, I recently posted that I'd binned the onboard preamp in my Faith Venus and wired the stock undersaddle piezo directly to the output jack, with pretty good results.

The benefits are that you can use the same outboard preamp for all of your guitars, you can update it whenever better tech comes along, and there are no batteries to worry about. Oh and you get a free soundport aimed at your face

The original preamp in my Faith was fully featured and supposedly very versatile, but to my ears was full of unnatural spikes and notches, and had to be tweaked song by song and venue by venue trying to find a totally elusive sweet spot.

I'm currently running my passive piezo directly into a Zoom AC-3 floor pedal and although it's never going to sound like a pre-war Martin into a vintage ribbon mic it's a solid, serviceable tone which works in all contexts, from delicate recital-type gigs to rowdy boozers full of squawking hen night ladies.

Anyway, @Jetfire asked me if he could hear the results, so I've done a quick noodle into Cubase with no processing in the DAW whatsoever other than panning left-right and adjusting levels. It's not earth-shattering stuff, but apart from some spitty-ness introduced by Youtube compression it's exactly the tone I get live and it works well enough with a good singer.

(There is a soundhole pickup in the pic, but that was unused, it was just a backup for the now defunct preamp.)

Jetfire · March 2020

That's pretty cool! Thank you for doing that! Sounds nice, and the playing is awesome too

Funkfingers · March 2020

Still detectably a piezo UST but a sound that would work perfectly well live, regardless of the size of the ensemble in which it is used.

Danny1969 · March 2020

Lovely playing, I would be very happy with that acoustic sound in a live environment, that's more than good enough

Kilgore · March 2020

Sounds ace. Great playing.

ICBM · March 2020

That sounds really good. As Funkfingers said, you can hear it's a piezo pickup, but only just - and that's completely in isolation, in a mix it would be very convincing. If you could fix the clipping on some of the extreme transients it would be even less noticeable. Very nice playing too

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p90fool · March 2020

Thanks all, it's quite a usable tone isn't it? I couldn't get anywhere near that while the preamp was still in the guitar.

@ICBM you're right about the transients, but that clipping appeared somewhere between my video editor and YouTube, it's not on the wav I exported from Cubase.

TimmyO · March 2020

Yep that’s far nicer than 95% of any live acoustic guitar sound I’ve heard in the last few years (big acts and TV spots included)

LastMantra · March 2020

I think plugging in acoustic guitars is the work of the devil!

That actually sounds pretty good (excellent playing!). Can still tell it's not acoustic though.

All very much IMHO of course.

ICBM · March 2020

p90fool said:

@ICBM you're right about the transients, but that clipping appeared somewhere between my video editor and YouTube, it's not on the wav I exported from Cubase.

That's annoying!

TimmyO said:

Yep that’s far nicer than 95% of any live acoustic guitar sound I’ve heard in the last few years (big acts and TV spots included)

I went to a fairly big gig on Saturday, with two acoustic guitarists, one had a very nice sound and the other was absolutely terrible - no visible pickup on the good one (some sort of small-bodied Martin by the look of it) and the bad one seemed to be an electro-acoustic, although I wasn't close enough to see what because he was half-hidden at the back...

p90fool · March 2020

LastMantra said:

I think plugging in acoustic guitars is the work of the devil!

That actually sounds pretty good (excellent playing!). Can still tell it's not acoustic though.

All very much IMHO of course.

Well I wouldn't dream of plugging in an acoustic for a studio session, but this is just a quick demo of my live setup.

@LastMantra ; If you don't plug them in, what do you use instead? Most of the venues I play at are too small and too rowdy to even think about micing up an acoustic, even systems with a blender for an onboard mic are too feedback prone.

ICBM · March 2020

p90fool said:

Well I wouldn't dream of plugging in an acoustic for a studio session, but this is just a quick demo of my live setup.

@LastMantra ; If you don't plug them in, what do you use instead? Most of the venues I play at are too small and too rowdy to even think about micing up an acoustic, even systems with a blender for an onboard mic are too feedback prone.

This. I’ve said before that even the most basic mic sounds better than even the most sophisticated pickup system, but the reality of live music means that it isn’t practical in most cases.

I don’t like internal mics either, for what it’s worth - to me they don’t sound much better than a plain pickup really, not at all the same as an external mic, and just cause feedback.

However I have been known to describe electro-acoustics as the work of Satan, and it does annoy me that ‘unplugged’ usually means an acoustic guitar plugged in

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LastMantra · March 2020

p90fool said:

LastMantra said:

I think plugging in acoustic guitars is the work of the devil!

That actually sounds pretty good (excellent playing!). Can still tell it's not acoustic though.

All very much IMHO of course.

Well I wouldn't dream of plugging in an acoustic for a studio session, but this is just a quick demo of my live setup.

@LastMantra ; If you don't plug them in, what do you use instead? Most of the venues I play at are too small and too rowdy to even think about micing up an acoustic, even systems with a blender for an onboard mic are too feedback prone.

Sure, there's not really much option I suppose. Didn't say my philosophy was perfect!

BigLicks67 · March 2020

Sounds okay to me. The ac-3 and reverb seems to be adding a bit of body and definition to the brightness of the piezo and definitely more than adequate for a live gig.
Regards, pickup versus mic I think these 2 videos by Kelly Joe Phelps sum it up for me (obviously with a mic a quiet and appreciative audience helps : >)

p90fool · March 2020

Definitely wouldn't be able to use the latter at my gigs, but obviously that sounds the best.
The pickup he's using is magnetic though and I've never got them to work for me, not least because whatever I get them to sound like, they still have that slightly clanky attack of an electric guitar played super clean.

I've always been a bit of a staunch supporter of UST pickups because as long as I can get good string-to-string balance and a reasonable EQ they do actually feel like an acoustic guitar to play. Getting rid of the quacky plink is a bonus though.

BigLicks67 · March 2020

p90fool said:

Definitely wouldn't be able to use the latter at my gigs, but obviously that sounds the best.
The pickup he's using is magnetic though and I've never got them to work for me, not least because whatever I get them to sound like, they still have that slightly clanky attack of an electric guitar played super clean.

I've always been a bit of a staunch supporter of UST pickups because as long as I can get good string-to-string balance and a reasonable EQ they do actually feel like an acoustic guitar to play. Getting rid of the quacky plink is a bonus though.

Yep, I'd take a UST over a magnetic one based on my experience of them, even the really expensive Sunrise one in the video sounds to me no better than a Fishman Neo D in practice.

crunchman · March 2020

BigLicks67 said:

p90fool said:

Definitely wouldn't be able to use the latter at my gigs, but obviously that sounds the best.
The pickup he's using is magnetic though and I've never got them to work for me, not least because whatever I get them to sound like, they still have that slightly clanky attack of an electric guitar played super clean.

I've always been a bit of a staunch supporter of UST pickups because as long as I can get good string-to-string balance and a reasonable EQ they do actually feel like an acoustic guitar to play. Getting rid of the quacky plink is a bonus though.

Yep, I'd take a UST over a magnetic one based on my experience of them, even the really expensive Sunrise one in the video sounds to me no better than a Fishman Neo D in practice.

The magnetic soundhole pickups don't help the acoustic tone either. Clamping that much weight to the top really doesn't help. I did it to two guitars, and only realised later that that was probably the reason why I didn't like the sound of them any more.

ICBM · March 2020

I do think a magnetic sounds better than a piezo if they’re both without processing - the basic tone is just more natural - but as a source for a modelling processor like the Zoom, Boss AD8, Fishman Aura etc then a piezo UST is best, because it actually captures all of the harmonic information from the strings, whereas a soundhole pickup cannot, because it’s halfway down the strings so it can’t sense all the high harmonics... so a UST goes from the worst to the best if you process it properly.

Soundboard contact pickups like the K&K are somewhere in the middle - although having recently compared a K&K to a Baggs active soundhole pickup in the same guitar, I was quite surprised to find the Baggs sounded more natural and lively than the K&K with no processing. I also tried a Fishman magnetic and a K&K through my Boss, and then the K&K sounded better.

And for what it’s worth, anything other than a magnetic soundhole pickup sounds rubbish with distortion

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Ditching your onboard preamp...

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