Zoom A3

I just picked up a Zoom A3 acoustic guitar processor and I thought I’d share some info about it since I know many BeatBuddy users are acoustic players as well. I bought it because I hate hate hate what pickups do to the sound of an acoustic guitar: piezos respond only to the vibration of the strings that pass through the bridge, magnetic only respond to the vibration of the metal of the strings. In either case, you loose the vast majority of the warmth and resonance of the body and the rich harmonics almost vanish. Also, if you’re plugging into a mixer not using a direct box or preamp of some kind, you’re quite possibly also losing the guitar’s brilliance due to impedance mismatch issues.
The Zoom A3 uses modeling to make pickups not sound like pickups. You chose a body type and a model type that best suits your guitar and you can store several different presets if you perform with more than one instrument. It also has a mic input so you can have a mix of direct sound and pickup signal. The processor has a set of equalizers, compressors, reverbs, choruses, etc. to help find just the right sound.

I’ve never been pleased with the sound of my acoustic guitars when highly amplified, they sounded metalish and harsh, not woody and warm, until now!

Another nice addition is the “Acoustic Exciter” that will work with any pickup system that you have installed. It works almost like a “Sonic Maximizer” to enhance all of the frequencies but maintains the depth of the acoustic sound. I also have a “Dean Markley Trilogy” pickup system that I had in my Gibson J200 for a while. The only thing that was really unusable was the mic. It fed back too easily with an open microphone. Haven’t tried the Zoom A3 yet but will look into it. It’s hard to find the right combination to get that “Total Original Acoustic Sound”. Don’t know how the Pro’s do it.
Thanks for the info. Fingerstylepicker.

I use a Fishman Aura Imaging pedal [Dreadnought] and I like it. With some reverb and chorus it sounds very good. I play a Gibson Songwriter Deluxe.