Fishman Spectrum Ora pedal?

bermudianbrit

Hi all,

I heard this was a really good and useful acoustic guitar pedal, to clean up the piezo nastiness. It also has some compression, anti-feedback, all the stuff one would expect. Can anyone comment? Anyone use this pedal or can recommend something similar/better?

Lewy

I used to use one but have since moved away from using piezos and the Aura doesn't really work with anything else. I think it's still the best solution out there for piezo equipped guitars though. Not the easiest to dial in - you need to make friends with it to avoid a lot of nasal sounds but once you get there it sounds great.

ICBM

The Aura is brilliant, but as Lewy says it works best with a plain, unpreamplified piezo undersaddle pickup, and it is very different to dial in compared to anything else I've used - if you don't get it right, it can sound awful.

It's important to realise that it's *not* a guitar-modeller, it's a *microphone modeller*. It works by matching the signal coming from the guitar with its models of the same guitar type mic'ed in a studio, so you have to make sure it's getting the same signal that it expects otherwise it will sound very wrong - it took me a while to get this as well, it's a very non-intuitive concept when you're used to other modellers and outboard preamps. But when you get it right, it sounds fantastic.

If you want a straightforward preamp which will work with almost any pickup system, the LR Baggs Para DI is very good, but doesn't have any of the modelling stuff, compression or tuner although it does have a simple feedback control.

The Boss AD-8 might be worth a look too, it doesn't have compression but it has body resonance modelling, anti-feedback and EQ so it's somewhere between the two, and it's also got a purpose-designed output for putting an acoustic guitar through an electric guitar amp, which may be handy for emergency situations (even though you normally wouldn't want to do that).

bermudianbrit

nice. I was thinking of using it with the Taylor, to improve the sound on that. But since the Taylor's expression system is transducers not piezo, would this break it?

Lewy

bermudianbrit said:

nice. I was thinking of using it with the Taylor, to improve the sound on that. But since the Taylor's expression system is transducers not piezo, would this break it?

I can't imagine it would sound good. Using an Aura with K&K Pure Mini sounds bad (modelled resonance on top of real resonance sounds weird) and expect it would be the same with other transducer-based systems.

ICBM

bermudianbrit said:

nice. I was thinking of using it with the Taylor, to improve the sound on that. But since the Taylor's expression system is transducers not piezo, would this break it?

No, but it would almost certainly sound terrible.

mellowsun

TC BodyRez works well with piezos . The effect is quite subtle but it does dial out most of that plastic-y sound

Bidley

I like the Radial stuff. I've got a PZ-PRE but they do a single-input one that's similar.