[Soul Kitchen]

Hey, I play a variety of styles including some funk, jazz, folk, flamenco, and heavily percussive michael hedges type things.

The guitar I love most for this is my nylon string spruce top yamaha, which has a killer sound and action even though it only cost me $250. When playing live though I'm really looking for options besides playing into a microphone... it would be fine for classical stuff, but anything more intense than that and I just need to be moving around onstage. And I'd also be interested in running the guitar through some effects like a looper which is tricky if not impossible when relying on a house microphone.

Soo I've been looking into my other options for amplifying my sound. If my understanding of electronics is correct an acoustic pickup wouldn't work because the treble strings are nylon and the magnetic field of the pickups wouldn't react with them, right? If I installed a microphone inside the guitar what would I run that into? an acoustic amp, or something more like a personal PA? and would I have to worry about it coming loose when heavily drumming on the guitar? And finally, this one's a little out there, but does anyone have any experience with synth pickups? I know godin sells nylon string guitars with synth pickups installed in them, I could have a loooot of fun with all the options that would give you, but would I also lose the ability to add in percussive stuff? Thanks a lot to anybody willing to read through all this and help answer my questions.

[dadfad]

It really sounds like you need an additional guitar. A nylon string classical is pretty limited in what it's made to do, and that's sound like a classical guitar (more or less). Mic's can amplify that sound of course, and a good well-mounted internal mic might do some of what you want, but you are in effect trying to make the guitar do a lot of things it wasn't intended to do. Get a second guitar, a steel-string. Or if you definately for some reason want a classical get a Gibson CE type with on-board electronics (I think Epiphone makes a similar model). That would make the things you want to do much easier, which in effect is to make an acoustic guitar not sound like an acoustic guitar. That Hedges/Preston Reed kind of thing is/was done on a steel-string (with quite a few effects and electronics added). Of course with spending enough time and money you can make any guitar sound any way you want it to, but it's much easier and cheaper and more technically-efficient to just get another guitar more conducive to these things. It's a little like saying "I have this cat, and he's really cool and I love him to bits. If I could only train him to meow loudly if there's an intruder, attack on command and flush out pheasants and rabbits in the field when I go hunting, then he'd be the perfect cat." The solution isn't to go through all the trouble necessary to train the cat, it's to get a dog too!

[Soul Kitchen]

ah yea I was afraid of that being the case, was just wondering though, was I right in the way the electronics work? saw a nylon guitar on this site www.exoticguitars.co.uk (under the nathan sheppard category) that had some sort of piezo, how does that work? and if I was to get a mic installed that would go direct into a PA, correct?

[dadfad]

I'm not very knowledgeable about classical guitars. I have one, but it's purely acoustic and I don't use it often. I have seen some surprising things done with CE type classicals that I'd have thought extremely hard to do with them. They have sensors that I'd imagine are very similar to the piezo-type used in some steel-strings, but I've never seen them available by themselves to be mounted in or as a replacement bridge for a classical. Piezos work on vibration and of course a steel-string has a more intense vibration than a nylon string, but I'd think the nylon sensors/piezos work on the same principle. They can plug into anything an acoustic steel-string with onboard electronics can plug into (and the same with an internal microphone). An acoustic amp, a regular amp or a PA. I prefer a PA myself, but that's just my choice (actually I prefer mic'ed/PA to onboard). Preston Reed for example usually uses an electric guitar amp for his tap/slap kind of stuff (similar to the things Hedges was into). That's one thing about getting into more "experimental type" guitar, you have to experiment with it! An internal mic into a PA (or amp) is probably a pretty good place to start anyway.

[Soul Kitchen]

ok, thanks a lot for all the help!