I’m working on a new plugin and I’m doing some low brow market research. I have a couple of questions:
Do you ever use the DI on your acoustic guitar for recording?
Do you have any plugins or hardware that makes the DI not sound like dog poop?
Here’s a quick demo of the prototype I’m working on. When it comes to dialing in sound, my ears get numb pretty quick, so I may come back to this sample tomorrow and regret posting it, but whatever. I admit that it’s a little bit of an unfair comparison because I really didn’t put much thought or effort into micing the guitar, and the guitar itself is about as cheap as they come. But I’m pretty excited about the way this one is turning out.
I wasn’t at all impressed with Bodilizer. Your’s sounds like it has potential, although the demo does sound muffled in the high end compared to the mic’d sound.
I never used DI on acoustic because of the very canine reason you mentioned
I would give it a try though (blended with a LDC mic take), if any of the following situations occurred:
unusual playing style (faint solo played with the fingertip instead of nail or pick)
decent mic unavailability
desire for an unnatural sounding guitar in the mix with peculiar sound processing
That said, I must say I am pretty impressed by your plugin, you really managed to turn a cheap internal pickup into a fake mic’d guitar. Although I still prefer your mic’s guitar take to the plugin, because the plugin take sound like it has too much EQ processing to my ear (too much low-end and a little too hyped in the highs).
I have used similar sound processing in live situations: I was using a Zoom A3 pedal for my Martin guitar that comes equipped with a lousy Fishman pickup. The pedal was supposedly mimicking various well-known guitar and mic models. It was far from realistic but still a noticeable improvement to the pure DI sound. Your plugin reminds me a lot of this pedal.
Yeah, it is. This is partly because I thought the mic’d guitar was too bright, and partly because I was modelling a farther mic position than I tracked here. Even if I did match it up, they wouldn’t sound the same exactly.
it’s going to be one of those plugins that will get a lot of very mixed reactions. The only other plugin I know of that attempts this is UAD’s woodworks, and that one has very mixed reviews and goes for $299. But they promise a lot of stuff on their product description.
My goal is to make this one better and cheaper and not tied to UAD’s dongle. I don’t think any of those will be hard to do.
I have used a DI from my acoustic and it has been great on the right things. I run into a Line 6 POD Pro (one of their preamp emulations of an API console) and did some low cut. I use it when I want that in your face kind of picking sound or with rock bands that do that acoustic intro thing all the time. for a singer/songwriter type vibe I may blend it in but generally use a mic’d guitar.
I have been playing around with a few things as time permits as I just got a new ovation elite with a preamp in it,
I run a di into my interface and a pencil condenser toward the soundhole and a AT3035 just above my shoulder.
for the di I have been using the ik amplitude acoustic stompbox with no amp and add the soundtoyz seq to bring out the pretty parts. I’m still playing with the placement and settings but getting something I really enjoy hearing when I get some time I throw up a few sound clips.
I’ll sometimes take the DI as a safety when tracking live but very (very) rarely use it… Just never been able to deal with that quacky piezo sound!
Having said that, I’ve re-amped it from time to time for effect and that can work quite nicely depending on the track.
I demo-ed the UAD version when I was given something to mix that had only DI’ed acoustic and had fairly decent results. I just printed the audio though and didn’t end up buying the plugin due to the price as that was a fairly rare occurrence for me. If you can pull off something similar to that with a more realistic price I’d definitely be interested. It’d give more options in a live tracking situation for sure. The ‘quack remover’!
The ‘DI after Plugin’ samples does sound very ‘live’… very much like the ‘Mic’d Guitar’ sample just with more of ‘the room’ in the sound. This example makes me think of good audience recording. Seems like a lot of potential there.
I think the trickiest part about this plugin will be providing the right controls that makes it easy to dial in. With a lot of massaging on my end, I can get the DI to sound good, but every DI sounds different and what may sound good on one guitar may sound bad on another, so it will need very intuitive controls that make it easy to dial in on any guitar.
Does anybody want to send me a short clip of them playing an acoustic guitar through a DI? Bonus points if you can mic the same take for reference.
Whatever you develop, make sure you can use it for different types of pick-up systems. I use an LR Baggs M1 (the off-white one you see quite a lot) for live situations. I like the sound: it doesn’t have any quack like piezo’s, nor does it sound like a normal (electric) pup, but it does miss some high end sparkle. A different challenge I would assume than your typical piezo. I have tried mixing it with the miked recordings, but it didn’t add anything worthwhile, so I stopped doing it.
There’s a new kid on this block worth checking out (it’s the competition after all) : the Irig acoustic element, see:http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigacousticstage/ . I thought the recordings sounded pretty good, and might consider buying one for when I want to have a second acoustic guitar on stage. Has anybody tried this? If it really is as good as these recordings seem to prove, it might be worth using in the studio. In Europe it sells for 122 euro’s, which is pretty hard to beat…
I’ll definitely need to try that out. I won’t be able to make it specifically work for every pickup design out there, but if I can at least get the settings in a way where it can be dialed in with any pickup, then that’s about as close as it’s possible to get.
Shits & giggles, Have you tried it with a DI from an electric guitar? I know it is going to be different, but it may reveal a bunch. Also if it can make that DI sound like a mic’d acoustic, well cheers!
