Decent direct acoustic guitar sound possible?

[Seiken]

I play a Tanglewood TW45-FLM with a Fishman Classic 4 pickup/preamp/system/whatever you call it. Just has the standard bass, mid, treble, presence, and volume sliders.

The only recording gear I have at this point is an original Line 6 POD (not even 2.0!) This goes into Ableton Live on the PC.

So what I'm wondering is if it's possible to get a decent acoustic guitar tone with this setup. I've been trying a few different ways and can't come up with anything I like.

For example, I found that the signal is much cleaner when the volume on the Fishman is low... but then, of course, my signal is very quiet. So I can make up for that by turning up the drive a bit on the POD, but I can only go so far before introducing distortion (just using the "tube preamp" model, btw, not any of the guitar amp models.)

Any ideas? Also, what do you find tends to work well as far as the bass, mid, treble, and presence sliders go?

Thanks,
Seiken

PS: I know my setup sucks, but it's all I can afford.

[Rmorph]

Hi there,

Short answer: no.

From a recording perspective, a direct line in will never be an alternative to live mic'ing. You wont get the depth, clarity or fidelity. With a decent enough preamp sometimes you can get close, but the POD ain't it.

There are however a few things you can do to make your sound more presentable, if not exactly stellar:

1. Clean up the POD sound as much as possible. Rely on the fishman more than the POD, using it only as a direct box, more than as a preamp.
Sometimes gain and level aren't anything: the POD is not designed to work well with the clean high end that an ac. guitar requires, so rely more on the ableton EQ'ing etc for sound shaping of your signal. So long as the "cleaner" low signal isn't noisy when amplified, it is preferable to the "coloured" POD signal

2. Play everything twice. This is the "Eagles" school of Ac. guitar recording, made famous by their habit of eoverdubbing everything they did, and panning left and right to increase the stereo depth: Experiment with this and you'll be very surprised at how rich even a crappy guitar sound can become.
The "inconsistencies" between two near-identical performances can really do something special to the mix - a kind of chorus FX if you like.
One has to be careful of phasing effects when doing this (simply: Two near-identical sounds can cancel each other out), but generally your sound will improve greatly. This depends entirely on how tightly you play, of course.


3. Compression and EQ.

DO this in Ableton. Keep the POD neutral as possible.
EQ first:
EQ the high mids carefully. Use a very narrow Q filter around 2 -3 K to kill the quackiness of the pickup. Consider pushing the 10k range up a bit to increase "airiness".. Compress the guitar tracks together through a light fast stereo compressor. This will bring a certain fatness to a Direct guitar sound that it misses. keep your guitar trakcs on a seperate group bus when mixing down with vocals etc, so that you can adjust them as a group without affecting other instruments.

4. Start saving for a microphone/preamp combo. It will make a big difference to your setup. With careful placement even an SM57 through a behringer preamp can pickup the natural acoustics of a guitar better than a pickup, but aim a bit higher than that :-)

Hope it helps.

[Seiken]

I will definitely try all this stuff out I'm sure it will help immensely. Thank you very much for the advice.