ToneDexter Live At Showcase

[guitaniac]

I finally got a good recording of my "Dexterized" amplified guitar sound in a quiet showcase setting. I'm lovin' it!

The guitar is a cheap spruce/mahogany Greg Bennett Samick OM which Kansas City luthier Dave Wendler overhauled for me. The pickup is a passive PUTW I/O UST which sounds good with a standard preamp, and even better with ToneDexter.

https://youtu.be/LQoV9smkPTY

[Peter Z]

Great. Reminds me on old cash and Dylan songs.
Your voice sounds relly good too. How did you amplify guitar an voice?

[guitaniac]

Thank you for the kind words. With respect to the system, the mic was just a plain old SM58. I didn't check on the rest of the PA system. (The primary host uses a Mackie powered-mixer and Audix OM5 mics, but we had a sub host on this night.)

I can tell you that I've recorded in this room many times. This was the first time that I've loved the amplified guitar sound. I had ToneDexter set for a flat EQ and full character sound. The signal chain was passive PUTW I/O UST> ToneDexter> mixer channel.

[martingitdave]

I watched some of your videos with the ToneDexter. I do thinking you're getting a great tone out of that guitar. I'm glad that you're enjoying it!

[Peter Z]

Originally Posted by guitaniac

I had ToneDexter set for ................. full character sound.

Would be interesting to hear it with the character set to zero (middle position). It sounds really great but IF there is something to improve, it would be a sound that is a little bit more direct in the mids. Just my thought and I maybe completely wrong.
It might depend on the in ear phones I used when listening. Those are quite scooped in the mids.

[guitaniac]

Originally Posted by martingitdave

I watched some of your videos with the ToneDexter. I do thinking you're getting a great tone out of that guitar. I'm glad that you're enjoying it!

Thanks. The pairing of ToneDexter with that little I/O UST-equipped guitar has been trouble free from the beginning.


Unfortunating, my gig videos seemed to indicate a consistency problem with Dexterizing the Barbera Soloist-equipped guitar. It was overly bassy in a few vids and just sounded "off" in some way in one particular vid. I decided that I just don't trust the Soloist's special wiring (adjacent crystals wired out of phase) to work consistently well with ToneDexter, especially in loud settings where the top is interacting with speaker sound. The guitar initially had a Fishman Sonicore system in it which seemed to work fine with ToneDexter, but I suspected that the thick co-axial pickup was deadening the guitar's acoustic sound.

I currently have a DTAR Wavelength system in that guitar. It seems to work well with ToneDexter (I had zero problems with training a pleasing WaveMap), but it will eventually be replaced with one of David Enke's "Open To Source Sensors" I/O USTs. He tells me that the new model I/O UST is even better than the older PUTW I/O UST which is currently the best performing UST (in my opinion) that I've ever used.

[guitaniac]

Originally Posted by Peter Z

Would be interesting to hear it with the character set to zero (middle position). It sounds really great but IF there is something to improve, it would be a sound that is a little bit more direct in the mids. Just my thought and I maybe completely wrong.
It might depend on the in ear phones I used when listening. Those are quite scooped in the mids.

I'm surprised that's how you're hearing it, as that guitar is acoustically strong in the midrange. It doesn't have the sparkling highs or the strong lows of my sruce/rosewood medium jumbo. It would be easy to accentuate the mids even further, when amplifying, by rolling off the bass and the treble a bit at ToneDexter. I'm very happy with the sound in this vid, however. I'd probably be happy with a lower character setting as well, but not as happy.

[Peter Z]

Good to know. Then the reason are my in ear phones. Will listen to it on my studio monitors later.