Fishman mini loudbox $299.99

bigeric

Just got back from GC and picked up this amp. Fishman mini loudbox. I tried several other acoustic amps and this one. Taking to a gig tonight.

MichaelHorowitz

only $279 here:

Fishman Loudbox Mini

bigeric

Nice price.
I just returned from a gig. The amp sounded very good. I was more than pleased.
Finally some usable tone from my Dell Arte.
No quack. Full rich tone. Chords were fat. Solo tone no problems.
You have to understand I am a diehard tube amp user. Granted this was in a very low volume situation. No PA. I sang without a mic. Most of my gigs are very lo key. Upright bass guitar and vocal. I went to GC today to try out a preamp. When I stepped into the acoustic room they had a bunch of amps. The salesman was trying to sell me an SWR blonde amp. It was a a dog as were the rest of the bunch. After I plugged ino the fishman I knew I was buying it. No harshness to my ears.


I did not say anything about a new amp to the bass player. We set up and I played a chord and he says I love that guitar. It is a nice guitar in my opinion. I was very excited to get it back in March.
However it was really lousy sounding in my tube amps. I was just playing it around the house.
Now it looks like I can take it to gigs more often.

I think if use a volume pedal I can back it down for chords and and havr some extra juice for a solo.

Craig Bumgarner

Bigeric,

What pickup are you using?

Craig

bigeric

I have a bigtone pickup. It was installed when I purchased the guitar from ****.
I was under the impression that Dupont was the maker of the bigtone pickup.
But am not sure if its a Dell Arte pickup. In any event I will be using the guitar and amp on 4 more gigs this week. Perhaps I will borrow a friends digital recorder and post some sounds.

Big Eric

Lango-Django

I just bought one of these yesterday at the local music store... cost $349 here in Canada, supposedly "on sale", but I wanted to actually try it before buying it... plus by buying it from the store I didn't have to pay for shipping or customs... so I think I got an okay price.

I like the sound of it, very natural. With my Michael Dunn guitar and its Schatten piezzo pickup, the sound was a little bit treble-ish, so I had to dial it down a bit. It didn't feed back until I pumped the master volume up all the way to the top, and it didn't get distorted as the volume increased.

Now I'm thinking about buying a volume control pedal so I can have different settings for lead and rhythm. I read somewhere that a volume pedal will slightly alter the tone, knocking off some of the treble... well, I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, for me that's not even a problem.

This amp is so light and easy to carry, especially compared to the PA system I was using previously. I've been dreaming of a setup that allows me to go do a gig with only one load of crap to carry, and by golly I think this may have done it... I'll find out tonight when I do my first gig with it.

mcneely11

I've had that amp for 4 or 5 months and it has been great. Ive only used it with a classical guitar and sometimes a mic but the sound and volume level is impressive for such a small and cheap amp.

Lango-Django

I took mine out on an outdoor dixieland gig last night. With this band I just play plectrum banjo but we needed a mike for emceeing and because a couple of us in the band will occasionally sing a tune.

All the guys in the band were impressed by the quantity and quality of sound that that little amp pushed out, and considered it a great improvement on the days of dragging around a massive PA system.

Today I'm going to fool around with it with my guitar and a couple of old foot pedals one of the guys in another band I play in gave me, a vintage DeArmond and a more modern Morley.

I'm hoping this will really help with dynamics. Generally speaking, when I play rhythm guitar, I Iike to keep the volume down to the minimum. But then the trouble is, when I go to play a little bit of lead, I end up fighting to be heard so much that I typically play half a solo in single notes before I give up and just do a bunch of shit with octaves or chord melody to fight for some extra volume.

Will

PS Going back to the plectrum banjo---I think I've mentioned this a few times to guys around here that might be interested in owning one to double with? Plectrum is the longer-necked four string banjo (22 frets) that can be tuned DGBE.

Anyway, a friend of mine is selling a lovely Bacon and Day Silver Bell #1 just like mine for $1700.,, which rankles a bit since I paid $1800 for mine over ten years ago!

E-mail me if you're interested--- <!-- e --><a href="mailto:jazzbug2@gmail.com">jazzbug2@gmail.com</a><!-- e -->

Lango-Django

OK, I've had a chance to play with my two footpedals a bit, though not yet on an actual gig.

So here's a preliminary report.

The vintage DeArmond pedal is huge, heavy and clunky, though to its credit its ancient pot didn't make any scratchy noises. The most annoying thing about it was that it doesn't have a spring to return it to the "low" volume setting... so you are forced to concentrate both on raising it up to the correct "high" volume when starting a solo, and then returning it to the correct "low" volume afterwards.

The Morley pedal was lighter, smaller and much more user-friendly. Initially, its pot made a bunch of scratchy noises, but somehow these went away all by themselves after a few minutes of use. I think I'm going to buy some of that freon stuff to spray on the pot and it should be fine.

Through the Mini Loudbox, my Michael Dunn guitar with its Schatten piezzo pickup sounded very natural at low volumes. I have a matching pre-amp for the pickup called a "Schatten DI Plus", but to be honest I couldn't tell much difference in the amped sound with or without it.

I'm going to have a fellow guitarist friend come over and noodle with it while I play to see if he can do anything to change the sound. I have no idea what "notch filters" or "shaping" are supposed do or any of that other electronic stuff.

Cranking up the volume with the Morley foot pedal was interesting. Yes, hallelujah! I was able to get a LOT of volume; I imagine plenty for most gigs I would ever be doing... and also yes, hallelujah! I was able to twiddle the gain and volume knobs to avoid feedback, which plagued me in the past with my 100 watt Roland Cube amp.

Anyway, the price you seem to have to pay for getting that extra volume is a general degradation of your tone... as it gets louder it also gets more treble-y and muddier.

Simply turning the treble knob down did get rid of the worst of the treble-lishness, but somehow the tone at louder volume, though, okay, yes, it still sounded like an acoustic guitar, not an electric, but alas it changed to something a little bit harsher and snarlier than I really was used to or hoping for.

I'm hoping when my friend comes over he can help me figure out how to use the DI Plus box to eliminate some of those qualities; assuming that is even possible...?

But whatever--- at this point, I'm willing to accept a somewhat lower tonal quality in exchange for some extra volume when I'm soloing, I'm just totally sick of being borderline inaudible and not really being able to play my best.

One thing that I feared, luckily, did NOT come to pass--- if I accidentally struck an open string in the course of soloing, it didn't ring out or feed back, but just stayed in the background and sort of died down quietly, just as if it would during a non-amplified solo.

The other thing that worked really great was playing along with my iPod in the amp's iPod input, because I occasionally do solo gigs where I use self-created backup tracks. While this input doesn't have any volume control knob on the Fishman, you can control the volume from the iPod itself and it works just fine.

So I guess if I had to give this little amp an overall mark, it would be somewhere between a "B" and maybe "B plus"... yes, it's got some really great features, but no, it's not the total panacea most of us acoustic players dream of... though what can you realistically expect for 300 bucks?

Looking into the future, I'm guessing that my next step might be to use some kind of expensive mike, either in conjunction with my Schatten piezzo pickup, or perhaps even instead of it, as long I can still avoid that @#$% feedback.

Anyway, I plan to write another report right after my next gig with my guitar and my Mini Loudbox.

Lango-Django

Confession time: I am a Mac user, and it is my frequent joke that "it is against my religion to read the instructions".

Well, I finally broke my own first commandment and went online to download the instructions for my Schatten pre-amp. This is the one I talked about above, which matches my guitar's Schatten piezzo pickup.

After reading the instructions, I'll confess to being none the wiser as to WTF "shaping" and "notch filters" are all about. But man, did I ever learn two other important things, which I'm going to share just in case anybody else out there is as stupid as yours truly.

1) The reason my pre-amp didn't seem to be doing a helluva lot was that I have been using the output at the front of the unit. Turns out that this is the output which bypasses pre-amplification altogether.. why? Because it is designed for a line to a guitar tuner! In order to get pre-amplification, duh! you have to use one of the outputs at the BACK of the unit!

:oops: (Yeah, I know what you're thinking, "What a @#$ing idiot!")

2) And that's not all. The two weird jacks at the front of the unit, the ones which I never ever bothered to think about, marked "EFX LOOP- "SEND" and "RETURN"... well, I'll be damned if they didn't turn out to have been put there expressly for the purpose of plugging in... guess what?

If you guessed "volume pedal", you are 100% smarter than old Lango-Django.

(Yeah, I know now you're REALLY thinking, "What a @#$ing idiot!")

So now, armed with those two amazing facts --- each of which I could have discovered years ago if I'd just bothered to read the @#$% instructions--- it turns out my LoudBox Mini sounds about a thousand percent better when cranked up to max volume, and yes, the Morley foot pedal works really well; totally noiseless and quite user-friendly.

I still haven't used the entire rig on a gig yet, but I'm really looking forward to doing so. I've even started using it when I'm practising, something I've never, ever done in my entire life because the amplified sound has just been so icky to listen to... did I mention that I don't really like the sound of an electric guitar?

Now I'll be the first to admit that my present sound is not a PERFECT reproduction of an acoustic guitar, but it falls into a category which has been invented by my friend Mr. John Kelly, a trad jazz bass player from Liverpool, entitled: "Good enough for the girls we go out with."

You know how, when you're playing with an acoustic bass player... and OK, his bass doesn't sound EXACTLY like an acoustic bass when it comes out the amp... but really, who gives a @#$, anyway---?

Well, that's pretty much the same deal with my guitar. And one of my other commandments is "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good."

So, moral of the story: even though the quality of sound coming out of my Mini LoudBox is less than totally perfect; am I ever lovin' having all that wonderful quantity of sound, whenever I want it for soloing!