Fishman Aura Spectrum DI Effects Pedal, PROAURSPC

Holy grail when it comes to acoustic guitar tone when playing live, just love the sound of my guitar when going through this pedal. The tuner is an added little bonus. Wouldn't play acoustically live without it. Pedal has heavy duty construction. Love it.

El sonido no tiene la calidad que esperaba y lo encuentro poco natural. El selector de instrumento no va suave y parece que se vaya a estropear. Esperaba una mejor relación calidad/precio.

I love the sound of a good acoustic guitar, but the sound of an acoustic guitar amplified with an undersaddle piezo pickup sounds terrible to me. Terrible. I've walked out on shows because of the buzzing, quacking piezo tone that sounds nothing like an acoustic guitar. A piezo pickup doesn't have a linear response. Of course it doesn't sound right, you are introducing distortion at the front end of your signal chain. Ick. Tragically, there are generations of young guitarists who seem to think that's what an acoustic guitar sounds like. Quaaaack. Some folks think this is an acoustic guitar modeler. It isn't. It will not make your Ovation sound like a Martin. It will not make your six string sound like a 12 string. There are boxes that will do such things (the Roland GR55, for example). What this box does is convert the undersaddle piezo output of an acoustic guitar to a mic'd sound of the same guitar using signal processing. The wizards in the secret Fishman laboratories hook up a guitar with its piezo pickup, and simultaneously mic the acoustic sound of the guitar. When they play the guitar, they electronically compare the mic'd signal to the piezo signal, and store the differences in an image file. When you play your piezo into the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI, it processes the piezo signal with the image to reproduce the mic'd signal. Pretty slick, huh? Science, man. Don't worry, you can still play religious music through it. I bought the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI hoping to tame the duck. It does! But it takes some time to match the image to the guitar. This can be particularly hard if an image is not available for your specific guitar. But there are enough images out there that you should be able to come close. For example, there is no image for my Luna AMD100, but after experimenting I found the Gibson Songwriter Deluxe Cutaway image sounds great on it. Even better, the different microphone models for this image have distinct personalities -- all good. The problems come when the image is mismatched with your guitar. The results can be all over the place. Some will nail the high end, but produce some strange resonances. Others will capture the low end, but produce a plinky high end. Some come tantalizingly close. In this, you can use it as an effect box if that floats your boat. For me, none of the mismatched images sound good. You sure can tell when you hit a well matched image. Boom! Magic! If all else fails, you can ship your guitar to Fishman and ask the wizards to make an image for your guitar. You can even select which microphones they will use. But it will cost you. The manual says to mix the image sound with the piezo. For me, the less piezo the better. I used to play out with a fairly high end acoustic through a magnetic pickup, and was never happy with the sound. I now play out with an inexpensive Chinese made guitar that costs about the same as the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI that is processing it. But I get a better sound than I ever did before. I've seen some folks complain about how much the unit costs. But if you can get great live sound with a modestly priced guitar through the Fishman, why expose your vintage Martin to the drooling, beer flinging hoards? This is a great technology, well integrated into a rugged, handsome, and convenient package. For me, it falls into the category of expensive, but worth it. And nothing else comes close.

For me - this is perfect. I play festivals with 1/2 hour changeovers & I need to plug in & sound good immediately. My Gibson J-45 pick-up is better than some but often the DI sound is scratchy & horrible. I sounds okay through a good acoustic amp but if I'm playing abroad or have to walk to a festival stage carrying an amp is impractical & cumbersome. The Fishman Aura takes your scratchy DI signal and turns it into full / lush sound like it would sound like if the guitar was mic-ed. A solidly built, high quality bit of kit. Things I would change: Swap the bass/middle/treble for a sweep eq & the anti-feed-back for reverb (so you can send the soundman your desired sound straight away). ps. The compression is also excellent. Throughly recommended.

I like this. I'm not sure if I'm getting the best out of it with my Yamaha electro-acoustic, but I'm certainly trying. It's very hard to use, and it's very easy to add too much of a "boomy" sound to the mix, and it's that room/real-mic sound that this tries to re-create... Overall, I think it's good...I'm still trying to use it...I just think it's not really worth the huge outlay... I wish something like this had been more easily available in DAW/VST software in the first place... (I should state that I use this mostly for recording rather than playing live/gigging)