Acoustic guitar 'rig' for country player

[Jack]

2 hours ago, JPJ said:

The purpose of the DI box is to get a good line level signal to the desk. Check that there is no pad engaged on the DI box (unless the acoustic output is hot enough to need a pad), then check that you are getting the correct gain level at the input of the desk. If these two things are correct, then use the eq on the desk to shape the tone of the acoustic guitar. In my experience, even quality acoustics can sound harsh at the top end and bassey at the bottom when DI’d into a desk, needing an eq cut in both regions to sound nice and warm. 

Yeah I will once again be taking on the role of soundman in this group and when we do it will be with my nice digital mixer that has a lot of control, through nice speakers, in nice rooms. Unfortunately the rehearsal rooms we use tend to have crummy analogue mixers with '3 band at best' eq per channel and nothing else. It's not that I don't know how to use a DI, it's that I don't know if the lackluster sound we've had over the past few weeks has been because the DI solution inherently isn't working for us, or if it's actually a perfectly fine solution being hampered by the crummy pa in a crummy room.

[BigRedX]

Which means that at some point the band will need to do a full technical rehearsal with all the equipment including the PA that they intend to use at gigs so you can definitely see if there are any problems.

[Jack]

Oh that's a given but ideally for snagging rather than expecting to have problems. It would be nice to have a plan going into that.