Acoustic guitar with humbucker pickup sounds like an electric guitar, not acoustic
Last week I had played the first time with a PA. My acoustic guitar Epiphone ej160e using mini acoustic humbucker sounds more like a clean electric guitar, not like an acoustic.
But why? Can someone can give me a hint which setup I should use ( additional Pickup, footswitch...)?
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So this guitar is quite a unique model, the John Lennon signature. Its pickup is not an acoustic-guitar pickup at all but, well, basically a standard high-impedance humbucker in small format.
It's no big surprise then that it sounds more like an electric guitar: such a pickup, together with the cable capacitance, forms a 2nd order lowpass filter, and that gives the characteristic electric-guitar sound. (Why did you buy such a guitar if you don't want its characteristic sound??)
To get a more acoustic sound, the best option is of course to use a microphone. Unfortunately that brings lots of problems in a live setting. Magnetic pickups actually remain the best in terms of feedback robustness etc.. They can also give a decent acoustic sound, but it's crucial that you avoid the resonant lowpass-filter effect. Properly designed modern acoustic PUs achieve this through a low-impedance spec, i.e. the coil uses thicker wire with fewer windings, which leads too a much smaller inductance. Unfortunately it also makes the signal voltage much weaker, but that can actually be compensated easily with a preamp.
If you want to keep the PU as it is in the guitar, there's another parameter you can change to keep the filter in check: you can lower the capacitance. It's mostly the cable that's responsible for this, so you want a decoupling circuit right after the pickup. This can be a very simple buffer:
(created with CircuitLab)
After that, the frequency response should be much clearer.
Of course make sure you don't use an electric-guitar amp but an acoustic amp or go straight into the PA via a DI, best an acoustic-optimised one like a Radial Tonebone or LRBaggs ParaDI. But with the active circuit in your guitar, a cheap passive DI like the Palmer PAN01 should also be fine.
The amplified sound comes from the humbucker pickup positioned between the sound hole and the end of the fretboard. Your guitar has steel strings and the pickup behaves exactly the same as the pickup in a solid-body guitar - which explains why the amplified sound is that of a solid body electric.
To get the acoustic sound you'll need to experiment with an acoustic microphone pointing at the sound hole on your guitar.
If you have plugged straight into the PA and not via a DI box that could account for your different sound. A cheap passive DI (and an XLR-XLR cable) is a good thing to carry around with your guitar gear.
I have never found a true acoustic sound with humbuckers. Single coil pickups like Fender is the only way I have gotten a true acoustic sound.
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