Bob Dubery wrote:
The preamp gives me some EQ (treble, and a bass with trim), a phase reverse button to help with feedback, and increases my confusion by giving me a second way to control volume.
Or third, if you count the volume at the desk/amp ? - I know you're mostly trusting an engineer for that though. I'm a bit old fashioned, and always prefer getting the source sounding right before tacking on an extra box to try fix things, but it's damnably difficult to get a perfect source sound with acoustic pickups - it's usually more a case of "which approach sucks the least?".
It does seem to remove a certain percussive aspect of the sound.
That is the crux of the biscuit as far as I am concerned - my biggest complaint with most systems is they have too fast a transient response and don't have enough headroom to avoid clipping the attack.
Have you tried any of the acoustic modelling pedals yet? I still want to try out the Fishman Imaging pedals sometime as clips seem to indicate that they do a good job of removing the "quack" and a more than decent job of modelling the body resonance lost by the pickup. In fact, If Fishman had been more helpful when I asked them about it a couple of years ago, I would probably already have tried one, but the guy became more than a little condescending the moment I mentioned electric piezo applications.
The D-Tar Mama Bear is also a possibility, but I'm not willing to order something to try on the basis that it
should work well. I tried the Roland AD-series a while ago but they were quite disappointing and don't seem to have taken the acoustic modelling concept any further since then.
