Gear used: Martin D35 Dreadnought Acoustic guitar with Baggs Lyric pickup; Prucha F5 Mandolin with K&K internal Pickup; Fishman Loudbox Performer Acoustic Amp; Google Pixel 6 Android phone
I recently purchased this pedal to try and improve the sound of my Martin acoustic and Prucha mandolin through the Loudbox amp. I’m generally pleased with the results and will continue learning as time goes on. I have not yet used the pedal/app for live performance (next step). The pedal and Acoustic Live phone app can be futzy and non-intuitive and I have some general thoughts in hopes this may be helpful for others and solicit comments!
The pedal/app delivers much improved sound for both the guitar and the mandolin through the Loudbox amp. Running the signal through a full PA instead of the amp should sound even better.
First and foremost, creating a complete users guide and some ‘model’ set up examples for the VPDI pedal could flatten the learning curve substantially and save new users hours of trial and error. I brought this up during a call with Baggs.
As with many pedals and amps, increasing gain and volume with VPDI at any point in the system creates distortion and significantly compromises the effectiveness of the VPDI. There may not be any way to overcome this although going through a PA should help considerably.
Out of the box, it took multiple attempts and several hours before the Bluetooth connection stabilized between the pedal and phone. I’ve seen this problem before on other Bluetooth pedals and not sure why it happens, but it does. Pretty sure it’s not my room setup. Inquiries with Baggs did not shed light, and there could well be a phone issue (noting that the VPDI was developed for iPhone and later added Android phones, I have Pixel 6…). Seems to be stable now.
My guess is that this pedal will yield the most improved results for piezo/undersaddle pickups that have inherently poorer tone IMHO (although some folks really like the piezo tone…) than other pickup types. The VPDI did wonders to improve the internal K&K tone on my Prucha mandolin.
The Advanced voiceprint option did not yield significantly better results for either guitar or mandolin than the Default setup (to my ears). I discussed this with Baggs and they concurred that the Default setting should be adequate ‘in many or most cases.’ I also inadvertently overloaded the Advanced setup several times with too much data, crashing the app before I cut WAY back on the number of input steps. This is contrary to the Baggs instructional video claiming unlimited samples are possible for the Advanced setup, not true. Not sure what the advantage of the advanced setup is but maybe others have ferreted this out, especially for mandolins?
What did yield better results for both guitar and mandolin was using a fairly inexpensive AT 2020 external recording mic instead of the phone mic. I ran the mic signal through a powered mixer with EQ then output to the USB C port on my Pixel 6 (need an adapter to do this from a standard 1/8 in audio jack). The mic placement and input level are critical, as any recording engineer would say. There is a good YouTube demo of external mic use with the VPDI (Red Hat Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHhRf6AUOI0). I also found that using the external mic with mixer EQ minimized additional EQ needed in the Acoustic Live app.
I got my best results (especially for the mandolin) by dialing the Q setting way down on the EQ controls of the app, setting the Voiceprint/Pickup ratio to about 80 percent, and setting antifeedback in the 25 range. Depressing EQ levels further (to control signal noise), increasing the voiceprint/pickup ratio, and increasing the antifeedback will kill the signal strength considerably. Compensating by turning the amp volume up increases undesirable signal noise and is not a good solution.
The combinations of Presets, Voiceprints, and phone vs pedal loading took me a while to figure out through a lot of trial and error. Bottom line for me, and I suspect many people is to stick with one Voiceprint per Preset per instrument and you are less likely to get screwed up. Maybe others need dozens of different Voiceprints, Presets, and Playlist combinations, but this seems like overkill and a recipe for potential chaos. At some point other factors for live performance become much more important than relatively minor subtleties in instrument voiceprints and output, again in IMHO.
I tried additional voiceprints with another mandolin and mandola using a Baggs Radius pickup mounted externally on each. The results were inferior to the voiceprint for the mandolin with the K&K internal pickup. The Radius pickup introduced significant signal noise (not a phase or ground lift issue) by comparison. I have yet to hear a Radius pickup reproduce good mandolin tone in any live playing situation including professional players with high-end instruments. The exception Sierra Hull where she uses the Radius on her mandolin in older Baggs YouTube videos that I suspect might have been further post-processed, or when she also uses a clip on F-hole mic in addition to the Radius on her Gibson F5.
Rick from Sisters
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