Fishman Aura Spectrum DI

Used with undersaddle pickups, the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI is a preamp / "effects" box designed for bringing back the natural tone of an acoustic guitar when amplified.  Often criticized for the "quacking" characteristic sounds, the undersaddle pickup's piezo elements are shunned by some guitar players who seek to amplify their acoustic guitars naturally.  But undersaddle pickups often are the way to go if you want to minimize feedback while playing extremely loud.

For me, I had installed a K&K Pure Western Mini bridge pickup in my R Taylor Style One Maple / Sitka Spruce guitar.  In the past many of my installations of the K&K performed just fine without feedback.  But for some reason, the R Taylor guitar just did not cooperate in handling the K&K and it had major feedback issues with it.

After playing a gig with my brother in the spring and finding out that I could only amplify my guitar to certain volume levels without feedback, I decided that the K&K pickup had to go.  I installed an LR Baggs Element undersaddle pickup in its place.  Immediately, I found that my feedback issues dropped considerably.  But turned up to concert hall levels, the guitar could still generate feedback at certain frequencies.

Always in a quest for better sound quality, I decided to try the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI.  This unit is known for bringing back a certain quality of tone that simulates simply using a microphone to amplify your sound.  But what I found was that besides its sonic qualities, the feedback suppression circuit and built in compressor is what amazed me the most!  When feedback happens, just step on the footswitch marked "anti-feedback" and the unit instantly looks for the objectionable frequency causing the feedback and eliminates it while maintaining the overall tone qualities of the guitar!  Easy and effective!  The compressor helps smooth out your transient peaks and volume too making it easy to keep a level sound quality.

As for the various sound "images" that the unit offers, there are many options available to match the tone of prerecorded guitars using expensive microphones to the various body types and wood options of acoustic guitars.  Matching one closely to your own guitar's body type and wood type makes your guitar sound better than it would by simply using the undersaddle pickup alone.

While the manufacturer claims you should use the right sound image to get the best sound, I found that by playing around with various images, you can get a wide variety of tones.  It may not be the way the pedal was intended to be used, but hey... who is to say what I can do and can't do?  It's fun to be able to change the tonal characteristics of my sound if I want a certain quality for a particular song.  This unit helps me do that.

So while I can simply just make my guitar sound one way, with the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI pedal, I can also make it sound like a lot of different guitars.  Perhaps on the long run, that's cheaper than buying lots of guitars!

Besides the sound qualities, the unit also offers me the ability to sidechain my other effect pedals and then output the final signal through an XLR balanced line to be plugged directly into my PA's mixer.  I can now run extremely long lines if I want without fear of signal loss.  The unit runs on a single 9 volt battery with about 20 hours of usable life, or you can use a 9 volt adapter to power it up.  I prefer to plug it into my pedalboard along with all my other effects pedals so I don't have to worry about battery drain.

In addition, the unit offers a phase switch to also help suppress feedback and it has a built-in chromatic tuner.  A three band equalizer effectively adds to the tonal palette.  Besides the built-in sound images, you can plug the unit into your computer's USB port and download more images as well.  This offers updates to the unit as new sound images are made available.

Overall, the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI is a great pedal.  While it's not one that you can point to and say it has made a major sound change to an amplified acoustic guitar, it's one of those pedals that works without you knowing it has made a difference in your quest to perform loudly without the typical piezo quack.  The build quality of this pedal is incredible as well.  Highly recommended.