acoustic vs amped Gary's Blues. Your experience
It is almost 3 weeks I'm done with Gary's blues which acoustically sounds just fine, and what I'm busy at the last 20 days is to make it sound acceptable amped, with not the slightest success. I mean normally anythingh you study emplove with time, with the amp it sounds as bad as when I started experimenting.
The strut amped isnt too bad, do you also find low key to be harder to play smooth with the amp?
I would like to know if I'm alone in that, or if someone of you experimented the same trouble moving from acoustic to mic, and if so how overcomed it.
I dont know if what I miss more is technique or amp setting "know how "
AMP: I've read you gotta turn up the volume just to the feedback limit to achive to desired distortion, but when I do so the slaps (the dip-slaps indeed) just tunder badly loud as drums from the doomsday, if I turn down the volume it sounds way better almost as it is supposed to do, but then I do miss all the benefit I'm supposed to have from a valve amp I think. DO YOU STRIVE TO PLAY AT FULL VOLUME?
TECHNIQUE: to make the slap-dip sound not like a pounch in the stomach what you found to be the real solution work on softening and relaxing your slap, setting the amp lower, or a mix of the two?
Thank you in advance for your feedback
Hank, your comments do matters to me, and I'm thouched you took time to go into a detaild answer, thx again
Hey Dario - you are not alone. In addition to the information on David's site, check out these two for what I found to be good useful information on amplified playing:
http://www.harpgear.com/
http://blowsmeaway.com/all%20about%20harmonica%20microphones.pdf
I found the cupping part of amplified playing to be the difference between just louder and getting good tone. I found low key playing to be OK amped when I'm recording against a backing track but when at the jam with other instruments, it's a tough thing to be heard.
Amp settings are critical to getting the amped tone you want once you've got the cupping technique. David's stuff on amp settings is really good but you have to play around with your own amp and mic to find the settings that work for you. I don't find I have to have the amp cranked full bore when I'm practising to get the crunch but it does have to be up a fair bit. Play around with gain and volume settings.
I'm not sure what you are looking for on the amp/slap question. Good luck with your quest and keep enjoying!!