Acoustic Guitar on electric guitar, best options.

  • I am sure this has been covered in the past, I am really just needing the quick best answer as I have 3 days to sort it out.


    I am in a Steely Dan tribute band and the songs run back to back, maybe 2 seconds at best between songs if any, it's just how the band leader rolls, no need for discussion here on changing that. (so, no time for guitar changes and my preference is just to have the guitar I'm playing all night do what I need at the push of a button and it's been working out, There are about 5 songs that pop up I need to switch to an acoustic sound, Rikki, Any Major Dude, Deacon and so on...


    I use a kemper stage for this gig and I'm on a Larry Carlton patch most the night, but I will need to hit that acoustic patch and right now it's set for "Morgan Acoustic Strat". Which surprisingly doesn't sound bad considering I'm playing a semi-hollow body electric guitar with Fishman Fluence actives Pups. (It's also not breath taking, either) I have noodled and tweaked as much as I can and I just can't get any more out of it and I am 80% satisfied (dangerous territory ), I can totally play the show Saturday the way it is and it will be acceptable. However, I would like to improve upon (if quick and easy) if the community sees anything glaring I may have missed.


    Signal path on stage for the acoustic patch is as follows... input >>> Acoustic Sim>>>>AMP (morgan) >>>(CABINET= OFF)>>>>Delay Widener>>>>Legacy reverb (and I absolutley have to dial back the clean sense to make this work on this patch, this patch doesn't like that hot active pup signal, but once dialed back and saved, it's working fine, input light stays green)


    (my suspicions)

    I have the CAB sim/Cabinet OFF here and I have a hunch that I could be doing something here that could improve the situation. Are there CAB IR's made for acoustic or is best practice still to not use one in this electric guitar/FAKE acoustic simulation which many have been doing.


    If you have the secret sauce please send it my way, if you know the thread that already has been discussed on this, send it. I like to play first and deal w technology last.


    Thanks for any help in advance!

  • I have just recently explored this myself. To get the 'best' acoustic sim, according to CKemper and my own experience, you should not have an amp or cab enabled. In fact, I remove them. My conclusion, is that the acoustic sim works best with single coil pickups. The best result I got was with my Tele bridge pickup. Strat middle is OK, but not as good. Les Paul was pretty poor to be honest. So, the result is very reliant on the guitar and pickups. I also use the hi cut down around 6kish and that is a bit too low for what I consider to be the best acoustic result. I raised it for this reason. The default settings are good but need to be tweaked based on pickups.


    There is a long thread, you can easily find it and it will take longer to read than find. I gave you the quick summary above. I don't know the Morgan Acoustic Strat profile so can't speak on that. Again, you want no amp or cab enabled, just the acoustic sim. I add some reverb to give a little life, but pickups and acoustic sim are all that is needed. If you don't have single coils, I would recommend using the pickup that is the brightest. The bronze and sparkle knobs in the acoustic sim are important and are 'tweaky' in regard to pickups and speaker. I use a full range PA monitor and it sounds good. Oh, and I have push the volume up in the acoustic sim.


    Edited to add this link" Kemper Acoustic Simulator - SECOND Look From An Acoustic Guy - YouTube This guy uses an EQ as well and he lists some settings that will require 2 eq blocks. I preferred just the acoustic sim.


    Edited second time: CKemper also stated that the acoustic sim is better in stereo. I only explored it in mono.


    BTW, what Carlton profile to you use? Just curious.

    Edited once, last by lbieber ().

  • you can find some free profiles of Neve and Avalon preamps in the Rig Exchange. These sound pretty cool with acoustic guitar tones. But generally speaking, no amp and cab will sound the best for acoustic guitar tones.

  • The issue I found with no amp was the relative volume was too low and without the amp you had limited/no control over it...


    I have the same issue when running a "real " acoustic ( just trying to set this up at the moment), that the relative volume is so low. Of course thats because the piezo output is much lower than a humbucker, but adding the amp gives more control.


    Is this the right way to do it? I might have been missing something ?