Acoustic Guitar Amplifiers

[tuneitfred]

I use a Trace 100 watt and 50 watt. Kinda old school but they work for me. Two channels DI output and they can get loud.

 

Fred

[milod]

I think you take your guitar to a guitar store and buy an amp that gives you a good sound to your ear for how you play, works like you think it should for how you work, and costs what you think it should cost regardless what the label on the amp sez it's designed for.

 

Rooms mess up "perfection" of sound anyway. <grin> That Bose is nice, though, from the ones I've heard a cupla guys using for solo type gigs.

 

I looked into a number of "acoustic" amps before I got what was at the time, about 6 years ago, a very moderately priced Kustom acoustic.

 

Solid state, 35 watts in theory, 10 inch speaker, separate plugs and channels for a mike and a guitar... line out, etc., and $140 mail order.

 

I thought the Fender and a couple other "acoustic" amps sounded tinny - although it may have something to do with my penchant for light strings.

 

Played mid '70s "original" design nylon string Ovation Country Artist and steel "Legend" through it, and it pleased me. A 12-string with a soundhole pickup ditto. "Worse," I really like it with a 175 or even an sg for doing a bit of fingerstyle solo jazz stuff.

 

But here's my background on acoustics and amps: I started playing electrified variations of acoustics through a Fender Deluxe Reverb 'cuz I had the amp for rock (although folks who knew me figured me as a folkie and bluesie, which didn't pay as well), and I could do a solo gig with it and actually carry it around. I played everything through it, and it worked well with a mike in one set a plug-in holes and a guitar through the other. I wish I still had it.

 

Swapped that for a big 120 watt tube jobbie that is best described as a Fender Twin on steroids. But ditto the same sorta controls. That swap came just as I got the Ovations in the mid 70s. Sounded fine in a saloon with guitars ranging from the Ovations to an F hole with an add-on pickup, a Gretsch and a Guild solidbody with humbuckers.

 

I got tired of hauling 90 pounds of amp and got the little Kustom. For a solo jazz or folkie sorta gig it works fine even in a 5-600 seat theater and it's not even sorta cranked up.

 

Old men supposedly lose the high end of their hearing, but I swear, most acoustic amps sound like they're jangling tin to me no matter what the pickup type. And I've used everything from sound hole pickups to piezos and even a couple of old clamp-on sorts of things.

 

For what I mostly do now, the little Kustom is an ideal match of sound, weight and overall capability for an old guy.

 

m