iRig Acoustic Stage mic pickup
 

After reading a post about it here & hearing/seeing the Willy Porter demo on Youtube, I bought one of these iRig Acoustic Stage mic pickups, $20 off now all over the place thru Dec 31, 2017.

While much has been written, I tried it on my Custom Shop Martin 000-18. The mic clips on the sound hole the size of a pick and you train your guitar with 4 strums up the fret board. there are 3 settings of Natural, Warm or Bright. My best result was rotating the pick to the round edge and fretting clean. Can't say enough how nice I got this to sound through my Ultrasound DS4 amp. I added my K&K xlr pre for boost/eq, but honestly didn't even need it. The amp levels were just turned up to compensate without the preamp.

For a living room it was perfect. Simple plug and play and affordable. Much has been written about gigging/delicate nature of the mic cable and plastic unit. But it is awesome for what it is and does! Home-run (for me). No drilling and gluing today!!

But don't believe me. Look at Willy's video. His Martin tone example sounded exactly like mine - only without the incredible talent LOL!

I’ve use it and like it too, but mostly as an addition to my K&K pickups. My experience is that it feedbacks pretty easily, so you have to use their anti-feedback system when playing. It has several different levels of anti-feedback, and at the strongest level, it seems to color the tone. So it makes a good complement to my existing pickup.

I am enjoying mine to running it through my Bugera Acoustic amp. It has a handle set up on top that allows for the unit to sit in the channel and stay place. Works great and I do the same moving the mic around on the sound hole. Only downside is the cord is such a wee thing on it. Very prone to breaking or getting pulled out etc.

Corey

This mic/preamp rig is a great value for its low price, but its designed with little headroom because of its low voltage (3v) power supply. I've learned, through recording experiments, that it severely compresses/limits the signal when the volume knob is on full and I'm strumming aggressively. One work-around for this is to not take the little preamp's volume knob past halfway and to boost the level (if needed) somewhere else in the signal chain.

Earlier this year, I watched the video with Willy’s playing and sound being the catalyst for a quick spin to the closest shop that had one.

I should have known that people saying it was ‘good for the money’ meant the alarm bell didn’t ring for some reason...GAS.:D

I have had fun fooling around with it, and it is good for guitars you don’t want to alter but want to electrify. But it has a hollow sound no matter what I do, though larger guitars do come up better, but I like smaller guitars. I prefer it to a quacking undersaddle or heavy metal soundhole, but it is better run to a decent mixer and better...EQ!!! I gave up on the fooey settings and run it on ‘natural’.

It sounds good with some guitars but not the ones I want...

I can see why they have the skinny lead to the mic clip - we don’t want a big guitar cable type lead hanging there, but it probably won’t go the distance. The input (aux) for an existing pickup is also a good idea but leads are going everywhere! And I run the vol on about 3/4.

So I have said it elsewhere, but they had some great ideas......but I hope Fishman or Boss, or preferably Neumann are working, working, working on their super high quality version, with wifi or bluetooth instead of that lead......and a nice Boss type floor preamp with DI..etc

I did a comparison by putting it on my Maton and run to my little mixer, then used the famous onboard Maton pickup system with undersaddle and condenser mic - ha ha, no contest, sorry iRig.


BluesKing777.

Sounds about right guys. I think what the Ultrasound does is make this sound pretty good ... maybe better than it is. I was at half to 3/4 vol on the iRig. Kind of is what it is. Hope I didnt oversell too much. A good installed K&K / other pickup is intended for my Martin down the road and is the way to go really for a live play situation.

As I understand it, the feedback notch function works on the full blended signal when another source is blended in. For the folks who like a mag and mic combo for live sound, using a passive mag with the iRig Acoustic Stage mic and blender/preamp would seem like a workable solution.

Albeit, I'd like to have an extension cable for the mic so that the little blender/preamp doesn't need to be hung somewhere close to the guitar. It gets a bit unwieldy when you have three cables running to a little box hanging on your guitar strap. I've managed to do it on several occasions (with a passive UST as the second source), but its SO much easier just to plug a good pickup into a ToneDexter processor. With the ToneDexter option, you get an externally miked sound to go with better feedback rejection and less hassle.