Acoustic Wedding & Cocktail hour

Tubehead

Inspired
Hey guys!

I have been hired to play a wedding and the cocktail hour this coming weekend for an out of town gig. It will be played on my Martin D28 Acoustic guitar equipped with Fishman pickups. I will play through the PA as I do not have an acoustic amp.

I started looking at Acoustic preamps like the BBE, Fishman and LR Baggs for this gig but then I remembered I have my Ultra! I searched for a few threads here and saw that people were using their AFX for acoustic applications.

I would REALLY appreciate some help if you guys could share some tips, tricks and sample patches to bring my D28 to life. I have 3 days to "dial it in" and apply this for my performance. I am usually an electric player but rarely do anything with my Acoustic which requires amplification, so any tips would be appreciated very much. Most of the playing I do is regular unplugged and since I need to go through a PA I am a bit nervous and feel that my Ultra can help me out on this.

Thanks!
 
search the forum for "mama bear", i think java uploaded a preset he designed to make use of one of the other acoustic IR's as well.
 
chapelizod said:
search the forum for "mama bear", i think java uploaded a preset he designed to make use of one of the other acoustic IR's as well.

Perhaps I'm interpreting the posts/topic incorrectly but I am not looking for a piezo pickup to sound like an acoustic. I am looking for the Ultra to enhance my actual Martin acoustic.
 
Tubehead said:
I am looking for the Ultra to enhance my actual Martin acoustic.
We need more acoustic players in this forum.

Don't use any amps or cabs. You'll keep the natural tone of your guitar. My sounds pretty good with this:

tape drive (optional but adds a touch of warmth) - mild chorus -multiband compressor (use this to tame dynamics & certain frequency ranges) - basic reverb ( or do a search for perceptual reverb and dial to taste) - graphic EQ to fine tune with PA - finish off with parametric to notch any problem frequencies.

If you use front input you'll have decent gain. If you use input 2 with fx loop (like I do) you'll have to crank up the input and turn up your blocks, but sounds great.

I do wedding gigs every now and then. I start with pure acoustic and eventually transition into party band with the 1 man band thing. Not many here are dialing for acoustic, but axe-fx works great for it.
 
Thanks so much!

I will try to setup a patch this evening and start working on it. I had never thought of the tape drive to add warmth but I guess with a mild setting it could really sound nice. I was also thinking of using a mic sim (Maybe R-121) at the end of the signal chain. I'll give it a try and see what happens. Perhaps I wont need it. I have the sound in my head what I am looking for so I am sure I can dial it in rather close.

Can you give me a starting point for the MBC settings you use? I am sure, if used correctly, that this will even out the sound and help make it more smooth and tamed.

Yeah, we need more acoustic players. I mostly play electric guitar (rock stuff). I can't believe that I originally overlooked the AFX for this type of application and considered buying an acoustic preamp. :D
 
Tubehead said:
Can you give me a starting point for the MBC settings you use? I am sure, if used correctly, that this will even out the sound and help make it more smooth and tamed.

Yeah, we need more acoustic players. I mostly play electric guitar (rock stuff). I can't believe that I originally overlooked the AFX for this type of application and considered buying an acoustic preamp. :D
MBC settings all depend on your input gain, the unique tone of your guitar, and the sound/feel you want. Try bypassing it until you've dialed your basic tone/gain. I'd put it before the reverb as well.

After you've dial the bulk of your tone, take it out of bypass and make sure it isn't doing any compression. Think about the frequency ranges you want to modify and set them up with the freq dials (my axefx is in garage right now). Then experiment with turning the gain of those ranges up or down to get an idea of what they sound like (kinda like a 3 band graphic eq). After that, if there's a freq. range you want to "tame" dynamically start experimenting with the compression for that range and listen to what it does.

You'll probably end up compressing all three freq. ranges so your dynamics are under control. You'll may end up with slightly different output for each freq range, and you may decide to compress each range differently based on whether you want certain frequencies reduced more than others when hitting the guitar harder.

Like I said, it all depends on your input gain, your guitar's individual sound, and the sound/feel you have in your head.
 
Tubehead said:
chapelizod said:
search the forum for "mama bear", i think java uploaded a preset he designed to make use of one of the other acoustic IR's as well.

Perhaps I'm interpreting the posts/topic incorrectly but I am not looking for a piezo pickup to sound like an acoustic. I am looking for the Ultra to enhance my actual Martin acoustic.


umm, that's what the mama bear and fishman aura were designed to do...
 
Back
Top Bottom