Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuki79
I also found that the Taylor ES1 must be played as an electric guitar when played lead.
You have to play while listening to the amplified sound and move your picking hand toward the bridge to get more bite.
Yes the sound will not be true to your acoustic but this system has a great dynamic and is able to provide fine sounding lead lines once you've accepted it.
Django Reinhardt had only three fingers... He made music with it.
Maybe one day, a kid on youtube will use a "vintage" Taylor ES1 and make crazy solos with it... Then everyone will tell: "Wow, how can he make an acoustic sound like that???)
Note that I was never wise enough to follow that road (train my finger to overcome the technology limitation).
Cuki
PS: There is however a real solution for the ES1 that implies less modification. Note that I don't take any responsability for the following:
1) Unplug the magnetic pickup under the fretboard. (I did it once, it is not that difficult). Then you will use only the soundboard transducer that does not suffer from the comb filtering thickness. Basically you end with a magnetic soundboard pickup (ex: Schertler makes one I think)
2) Buy a Tonedexter pedal and image your guitar from the Taylor ES1 soundboard transducer.
I will probably try to implement that with my own DIY IR process.
NB: In principle Taylor ES1?3 could become the ultimate pickup system, by making a new preamp board and using the stereo out jack to ouput two unbalanced signal: 1 from the magnetic pickup (super feedback resistant) and one for the soundboard transducer with Impulse response (IR) correction (ex: Tonedexter, D-Tar Mama bear, Fishman Aura....)
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I don't know, the ES1 was fairly bad IMO. I think it represented a time where Taylor were trying to bring everything in house and they really had to start somewhere. They marketed it as a fantastic pickup but in reality it was worse than most magnetic systems. Having to compromise between true acoustic tone and pickup tone is one thing but the ES1 actually sounded like an electric guitar, which is not a good thing.
It's so easy now to just order the tru-plug system, rip out the ES1 and install whatever you want. Far less work than unhooking the magnetic pickup and trying to make the SBT's work. I think there's a reason why you almost never see artists using this system. I remember a few people playing it when it first came out but they quickly abandoned it.