Acoustic amp vs. electric amp

[DoryDavis]

I've got an AER 60. My nylon string guitars (Cordoba) sound good through them. With my Maton steel string, it sounds good too, but for whatever reason I can get the melody to pop much (much) more when I plug it into an electric amp. Fender Deluxe. Is this an impedance issue? Its more satisfying to play the Maton through the electric amp, which is strange, I know the AER and the Maton are a great match used by the best...

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by DoryDavis

I've got an AER 60. My nylon string guitars (Cordoba) sound good through them. With my Maton steel string, it sounds good too, but for whatever reason I can get the melody to pop much (much) more when I plug it into an electric amp. Fender Deluxe. Is this an impedance issue? Its more satisfying to play the Maton through the electric amp, which is strange, I know the AER and the Maton are a great match used by the best...

Hi DD

I suspect when you plug into the electric amp, you also cut the bass down and accentuate both negative and positive aspects of the trebles.

The AER series of acoustic amps sound great with every brand of acoustic with decent pickups I've heard played through them.

I use acoustic amps for stage monitors because they do not distort easily, and generally are designed to make acoustic guitars sound acoustic.

When I play my Strat or Tele I'm using either my Fender Blues Jr. BECAUSE it does overdrive easily and produces a smooth tone with my electrics.

[J Patrick]

….sometimes an acoustic guitar played through an electric amp sounds amazingly good….certainly not like an acoustic typically sounds like unplugged and definitely not everyone’s cuppa…….but it can be a satisfying tone that fits some styles and situations better than an acoustic amp can….sure it depends on the amp, the guitar/pickup and the player but there are no hard fast rules….not any that I pay attention to anyway…

[ssstewart]

I have both acoustic amps and a few other amps..some are too big (the ampeg) others too small and others like my Roland (too bland) I wasnt allowed to buy any more guitars for Christmas so i cheated and bought another Amp), nothing special just a Traynor dynagain 30 with build in effects and 12" celestion...I bought it for ease of moving around ( its smaller than the ampeg- but alot bigger than my roland) to use with my telecaster for fun ( getting older so hauling stuff around sucks) I did try it out on one of my classical gits with a simple cling on pickup and ran the chorus on it too...and although i prefer it au natural..it was a lot of fun.. Did the same with my Art & Luth with a dimarzio pickup hooked up and played around with the reverb and vibrato on the modelling amp..again it was alot of fun. It was also very easy to get a CLEAN sound out of it and its not an acoustic amp, but the celestion lends itself well to an acoustic sound by just playing with the eq settings and dropping the gain off. Imo, its not as hard as it is sometimes made out to be to get the sound you want out of an amp. Im not negating the value of a GREAT amp but this traynor can stand up against my peavey acoustic amp easily..just by playing around with it. Im not trying to compare apples to oranges (or Martins to noname sears) but you get the idea

[rmp]

amps that are voiced for electric guitars, do not really support all that well amping an acoustic

you want a full range setup for an acoustic.

[Dru Edwards]

Acoustic amps are meant to cleanly amplify the natural tone of a guitar. An electric amp is meant to react to electric guitars.

I just checked the Fender Twin (electric amp), which is known as a clean amp, and the AER Compact 60 (acoustic amp). The THD values are 5% vs 1%. Thinking that will make a difference.

[BlueStarfish]

My understanding of the folklore from prior AGF threads is that UST piezo pickups, when first introduced back in the 1960’s, were originally meant to be played through the clean channel on Fender-style guitar amps. It’s all a matter of taste but here we are nearly 60 years later and my vote is that a UST piezo pickup played through a guitar amp is still a valid sound and can really work well for some material. It’s not exactly the same sound as a condenser mic through a clean PA, for sure. But it would have been the “standard” acoustic guitar sound for larger-stage live events for a couple of decades during which a lot of really great music was made. If you like it, well you are in good company historically. Feel free to ignore the folks that say you can only play an acoustic guitar through an acoustic guitar amp. Get on up and knock yourself out!

[doublescale1]

One of the best dual use, electric and acoustic, amps available is the Rivera Sedona in either 25 watts of 55 watts. The Rivera Sedona is a 2 channel amp, with ch1 being the electric guitar channel that is more Marshall flavored (a bit more mid-fwd than a BF Fender). Ch2 is the Fender voiced channel for electric but that is the acoustic channel when you pull the Tweeter knob out for an acoustic instrument. It sounds amazing with most any acoustic instrument, but favors guitars very well. I have a Sedona 55 that I got used from a studio back in the early 2000's. Given todays PA support I'd be more inclined to go with a Sedona 25, but the deal was too good to pass up. The Rivera Sedona series is all tube signal path, EL34's for the 55 watt, 6V6's IIRC for the 25watt version. The Sedona 55 just never seems to run out of clean headroom for acoustic, no matter how hard I strum. Doyle Dokes had the Sedona 55 as his sig. amp a number of years ago, my local indie music store had him in for a clinic every year around December and he always played through that Sedona 55. Just great tone. If you see one, be sure to play through it, you'll be pleased.

[pf400]

With acoustic-electric guitars, I have gotten great sound from acoustic guitar amps, keyboard amps and electric guitar amps. I have gotten awful sound from acoustic guitar amps, keyboard amps and electric guitar amps. With electric guitars, only electric guitar amps have worked. The largest Fender Acoustasonic amp was not good enough for electric guitars.

[Koamon]

I would venture to guess that the cool tone you hear is your guitar signal being pre-amplified and then powered through the vacuum tubes of your amp. Purist audiophiles only run their signal through vacuum tube preamp and vacuum tube amps for a reason. Electric guitar players overdrive their signals into their amps to achieve their desired tone and electric amp speakers are voiced accordingly. So when you plug in an acoustic guitar and don't necessarily overdrive your signal, you should get a warm slightly compressed analog signal. I have with the same results. I would venture to guess that if the amp was plugged into a sufficiently rated full frequency speaker with a horn, it would sound a whole lot better.