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Amplifier for Electric Violin?


fretmeister
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[color=#000000][font=Arial, Verdana][size=3]Any ideas?[/size][/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Arial, Verdana][size=3]
The daughter of a friend has just got an electric violin and needs an amplifier.[/size][/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Arial, Verdana][size=3]
My first thought was a keyboard or bass amp - but what say you fine people?[/size][/font][/color]

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Depends on what sort of sound and music she plays. Most electric violin players I know go straight into the PA at rehearsals and gigs. I she definitely needs an amp then something full-range like a keyboard one should do the trick. On the other hand I know of people who use guitar amps simply because they like a little bit of dirt in their sound.

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[quote name='fretmeister' timestamp='1423221798' post='2682325']
[color=#000000][font=Arial, Verdana][size=3]Any ideas?[/size][/font][/color]

[color=#000000][font=Arial, Verdana][size=3]The daughter of a friend has just got an electric violin and needs an amplifier.[/size][/font][/color]

[color=#000000][font=Arial, Verdana][size=3]My first thought was a keyboard or bass amp - but what say you fine people?[/size][/font][/color]
[/quote]

You should be careful, she could be on the fiddle.

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Been looking at the Roland Mobile Cube. Has a few minor FX, but seems to be for keys and acoustic guitar, and has a bit of reverb.

Might be just the thing.

She hasn't got a PA (She's 10 years old). It's 99% classical stuff. She plays in a local music trust orchestra that I also play in.

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I have a Roland AC60 acoustic combo which works brilliantly but wasnt cheap. I DI'd that into the PA and put it on a speaker pole as a monitor.
If you have a pickup with a built in preamp it will be fine going into the desk. A piezo pickup without one will need a high impedance preamp. I bought a used Carlo Giordano electric fiddle off the bay for 40 quid which worked out to be the cheapest solution.

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Mrs PTB also uses LR Baggs pick-up and pre-amp and DI's straight from the pre-amp to the PA.

However, it's usually important that everyone else can hear her too & monitor engineers often treat fiddle as a background instrument so she uses an AER Alpha acoustic amp. It's small, loud and sounds great so worth every penny.

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  • 1 month later...

AER the obvious choice, but expensive. I play fiddle, amplified and unamplified and I'd strongly advise that a decent pre-amp is the most important thing. It will load piezo and similar acoustic instrument pu's correctly. Any reasonable small keyboard combo will suffice with a properly pre-amped signal and it will sound much better through a PA, too. Guitar amps are not ideal - they have built in mid-boost, which makes a fiddle sound very harsh. I use a Fishman pu and a preamp made by the firm that makes the Sessionette amps. Works very well. There is a German-made fiddle pickup that is mounted in the sound post, which is fabulous - can't remember the name offhand, but it's not cheap.

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Lots of amps will do it. The HUGELY important bit is that her pickup is correctly buffered. Even if the instrument has a vol control that does not necessarily mean that it has a proper buffering pre-amp. It will sound like drek without one. It is all in the pre-amp.

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