Acoustic Guitar need preamp?

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bkemp23

New Member
Hello, I've been using my FM3 at church with the church's acoustic guitar. The FM3 has been working out great. The church acoustic, not so much. I'm considering installing a pickup in my acoustic but I've seen some that don't come with a preamp and some that do. Is the preamp necessary or can the FM3 handle a passive acoustic pickup? Thank you.
 
strabes said:
can the FM3 handle a passive acoustic pickup?
yes
Click to expand...
Hey Strabes,
Just wondering if perhaps you were using a certain FM3 out of the box preset? Or one you tweaked? Or perhaps a 3rd party preset you bought?
If you have a good one you're using that is not 3rd party, if you were to find time to share it here, I would be grateful.
 
AtomicJeff said:
Hey Strabes,
Just wondering if perhaps you were using a certain FM3 out of the box preset? Or one you tweaked? Or perhaps a 3rd party preset you bought?
If you have a good one you're using that is not 3rd party, if you were to find time to share it here, I would be grateful.
Click to expand...
I don’t use any 3rd party stuff so I wouldn’t be able to help you there. For acoustic live I usually just add a little bit of compression and verb, maybe a very low mix very dark analog delay to thicken it up a bit, and most importantly the cab block with the totally flat factory IR so that I can crank up the mic preamp in the cab block to get some saturation. Acoustic quickly becomes overprocessed and it’s impossible to make a bad acoustic source sound good with processing which is why I recommended that particular pickup. If the instrument sounds good acoustically then it will sound good with that pickup.
 
The K&K pickup is well regarded, inexpensive, and fairly easy to remove should you not like it, so I don’t think you can go wrong with that one. The FM3 has a 1M Ohm input impedance. That’s exactly what is recommended for the K&K pickup, so that should work well without a preamp.

I recently had a James May Ultra Tonic pickup put in one of my guitars. It is also a passive pickup and it sounds great right into the Axe-FX III.
 
The K&K is great, but be careful with stage volume as they can create feedback pretty easy. It’s been my experience that the K&K has a good amount of output so a preamp is unnecessary. Just EQ to taste, a little compression and reverb and maybe a slight delay and you’ll be in tonal heaven (pun intended).
 
K&K is a great pickup but I'm going to put a plug in for James May Engineering. I had the K&K conversion installed and cured every issue I had with the K&K (feedback, low end woofiness, weak high end).

https://jamesmayengineering.com/

After installing the pickup the guitar was much easier to EQ and I don't have any extreme settings anymore. I will be putting his regular pickup in any acoustic guitar I get in the future.
 
K&K is great - yes the James May system solves the K&K challenges, but a parametric EQ in the FM3 will do the same.

If you like your guitar, put the K&K in. Active systems add some weight, and unless you're going to cut a hole in your guitar for a battery trap door...changing a battery in your active system (when the only access is the sound hole) is a nightmare if you have to do it at a gig.
K&K design (IMO) is brilliant. They just took the preamp and put it outside the guitar (in their little box). You can clip it on your guitar strap if you need to. You get basic BMT and Volume controls....and the battery is always accessible.
 
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