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Old 01-05-2018, 07:00 PM
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Doug Young Doug Young is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Mountain View, CA
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The "best" preamp is pretty hard to answer, and I'm not sure what advanced fingerstyle means in this context? There are "advanced" players out there using all of this gear as well as others.

To me, the ideal for serious fingerstyle is to be playing in a quiet venue with a great PA and a mic - no pickup involved, so that would be my #1 suggestion. In a good venue, with a good PA and sound person, that sound will be hard to beat. On the other hand, you may not be playing in that environment, or maybe by "advanced fingerstyle", you mean the sort of CandyRat style? Those players tend to use pickups, often even on their recordings, for an ultra-punchy sound.

If you must use a pickup, any of these preamps can work well. Mixing in a mic, either via the preamp, or separately, directly to the PA where it can be blended into the sound from your preamp will work well, or you can choose a preamp that supports the mic directly. The Grace Felix and Pedulum SPS-1 are top of the heap in terms of quality, flexibility, and also support mics (Felix supports 1, SPS-1 supports 2). You can also combine an internal mic using Felix or SPS-1, which works very well (and is what many of the CandyRat players do)

ToneDexter is also a great option if you want to use a pickup. None of the other choices you list will do what ToneDexter does. Some of the others, like Felix, will accurately convey the sound out of your pickup and can sound very good. but it won't correct your pickup to sound like a mic, it'll be a good pickup sound. So ToneDexter is basically on another dimension.You can't compare it to a really hi-fidelity preamp like Felix or the SPS-1 - those preamps are designed to be pure and not alter your tone while ToneDexter deliberately alters your tone. It creates a high quality sound in its own way, and in a way that the other preamps can't. You have to try it to see if it's what you want.

For what it's worth, I currently have 2 setups for times when I can't just use a mic. With one, I use Grace Felix with a pickup (I have several different pickups) and an internal mic. Sounds very good to me and the mic makes up for a lot of the pickup sound. The second is ToneDexter, where I skip using the internal mic. Also sounds very good to me, and TD itself "fixes" the pickup sound. Actually, I also have an SPS-1 in a rack, where I also can blend the internal mic and pickup. Mostly sits in the garage these days - it sounds great, especially with the nice TC reverb I have in the rack, but hauling a rack into gigs is a pain. These are all good quality choices in my opinion, just depends. My ideal purely plugged in sound would probably be to be able to blend an internal mic with the ToneDexter's pickup processing. Lacking that, a reasonable option is to use ToneDexter for the pickup, and blend an external mic into the PA when possible.
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