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DADGAD fingerstyle, DI signal sounds brittle, help

AK
@aris.kemp
6 weeks agoAsked in Phone a Friend
D-28 strung medium gauge, DADGAD, fingerstyle. The room sounds beautiful. Two condensers six feet out, the recording is exactly the instrument. The problem is the DI from the K&K Pure Mini for live work. It sounds like a different guitar. Brittle in the top, no body in the mids, the low D is a thud. I know an undersaddle would solve some of this but I don't want one. The K&K is three soundboard transducers, it's the right design philosophy. I've tried a Baggs preamp, a Fishman Aura, and a bare DI into the Loudbox Mini. The Baggs is closest but it still doesn't sound like the guitar in the room. On an acoustic, intonation is louder than ambience. I'm willing to lose the room sound for live work, I just want the instrument to sound like the instrument. Anyone running a K&K or similar through a preamp/processor combination that actually preserves the body of the guitar? I'm not looking for IR magic, I just want a signal chain that doesn't make a D-28 sound like a parlor.
4 replies

4 replies

  • MA
    @mira.alves6 weeks ago
    The K&K loves a transparent preamp. The Baggs is colored. Try a Grace Felix or a Headway EDB-2. The Felix has the headroom the K&K needs to not crunch on a hard fingerstyle attack and the EQ is parametric, you can dip the brittle frequency directly. The Loudbox Mini's EQ isn't fine enough to address this on its own.
  • KT
    @kobu.tinker6 weeks ago
    Brittle on a K&K DI almost always means impedance mismatch. The K&K wants to see a meg or higher. A lot of stage DIs see 100k. If you're going K&K straight into the Loudbox without a buffer with the right input impedance, the high end is being unloaded. Add a high-impedance buffer and the top should mellow.
  • NH
    @noor.haddad6 weeks ago
    I had the same problem on the oud with a soundboard pickup. The fix was not the preamp, it was the gain staging. The pickup was hot, the preamp was clean, the Twin's input was being driven into the early breakup of its first stage. Drop the pickup output by 6dB at the source and everything downstream relaxes. Worth trying before more pedals.
  • LF
    @lo.flannery6 weeks ago
    Honestly, for stage K&K work I'd cheat. Run the K&K to a Grace Felix and a small condenser to a second channel, blend 80/20 in favor of the K&K but the condenser is what gives you the body. Most folk venues will let you do this. Sounds like the guitar.

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