Quincy,
Good questions. Let me try and answer them.
quincy451 wrote:
Ok a couple of questions:
1) what hardware did you put in your guitar exactly? Is this a under saddle pickup or one that is glued maybe to to the underside of the sound board.
I used a very inexpensive piezo transducer that is stuck to the underside of the soundboard. This particular one uses double sided tape. I wondered if it would be enough to pick up everything. It really is very sensitive and picks up everything. I have to really correct my hand position now to eliminate string talk with this system. It was a very simple installation, but I strongly advise you go slow and take your time installing it as you have to increase the hole size when you remove the endpin. Use a hand drill if possible. Going slow will prevent any suprises which are common to this kind of delicate work.
2) I assume you pay the $20 and the nasty adware nature of this software goes away. I installed it to check it out and ran it. It came up with invalid handle 3 times and I didn't think it was going to come up and it did. I think it was failing to find all the ads it wanted pop up. It did pop up a casino webpage. I simply closed that. The software looks pretty slick in terms of features.
Yes, you pay the $20 and it becomes a normal piece of software. Other than that, you need a good firewall and that will prevent most of the ads.
It has some very nice features. I looked at about 20 different programs for this and this one is one of the top 3 or 4. For the money it is number 1 in my book.
3) Ok cabling for this is from the guitar to the mic input on the computer. Makes sense. Only audio input the computer has without additional hardware. From there you cable audio out I suspect to your AMP. You using a acoustic or a electric amp? What kind of audio do you get if you simply left the normal computers speakers hooked up? Last really dumb question...if you have your AMP hooked up and you do something on the computer that makes sound. Do you get that sound from your AMP as well? I would think so.
Correct on the cabling. From the guitar to the MIC input on the computer. From the speaker out (headphones) on the computer to the Amp. I use a small 10 watt acoustic amp with an overdrive switch so I can get some electric sounds from an acoustic. An ok feature, but nothing fancy. When I go through the computer speakers, I get computer speaker sound. You know your system better then me. If you have a really sweet sound system running then use it. Otherwise, use the amp.
Any sound that the computer makes comes out the amp. This is pretty straight forward to me and acceptable. If I really wanted to, I could install a switch to the amp or just unplug it while I work on the computer.
I am interested in duplicating this. But I am using a classical guitar. So if the pickup is under the saddle, the pickup size is different because the saddle size is different. I was actually looking at a blended mic/pezzo setup. But the ARTEC unit I was looking at would require the full onboard preamp and seems to be a bit hard to find.
I did not want to punch a hole in my guitar to install some electronics so that is why I went this direction. Very minimal everything but I get great sound from it. Unless you know where to look you can not see any additional holes or marks on the guitar.
I do have a couple of minor regrets on doing this. When we did it, we did not lock the guitar to the table and pad under it enough and I now have some ugly marks on the back. I suspect most of it can be buffed out, but still, it could have been avoided. It doesn't bother me too much because the guitar had a nice selection of beauty marks on it when I got it. I just really hate to add to its collection.
Overall, I am very pleased with the results and I would do it again, but taking a few extra precautions to prevent damage.