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Getting a good live sound with your acoustic is simple. Play unplugged, sitting perfectly positioned in a sonically engineered venue with amazing natural reverb and projection. Make sure the audience is pin-drop silent. For the entire show. Also, it would help to play with an old guitar. Preferably something well-played with wood aged over thirty years.
We can fantasize all we want about getting the perfect live acoustic tone, but in the constraints of reality, playing unplugged and unamplified or close-mic'ed is only feasible if you're playing solo or as an acoustic duet (see The Milk Carton Kids). Even then, you're taking your chances. We all know the most reliable way to be heard from venue to venue is to use a DI box. Most venues have their own, but using it is often like playing sonic roulette. All too often, the infamous tinny, harsh, overly compressed plugged-in acoustic tone rears its head. Live performances end up sounded nothing like the warm, sensitive acoustic tone on your recorded studio version.
Enter the LR Baggs Session DI. Designed to emulate the acoustic tone a professional audio engineer could massage out of your instrument in the studio, it keeps things simple by focusing on two key parameters: saturation and compression. We love this. With only five intuitive knobs, it's automatically more attractive than some intimidating, mixing board-esque DI boxes out there. With four high-pass filters, a ground lift fix, three separate power sources and two output formats, there isn't a venue that can thwart the Session DI with the wrong cable, lack of power or weird hum.
The Session DI really breaks down your signal into the component that matter the most, whether going to the PA or directly into a DAW. Gain, saturation and compression EQ. More importantly, the saturation has been calibrated for the frequencies that matter most for acoustic guitars. On the flip side, the compression EQ narrowly targets the frequency bands that are most problematic with plugged-in acoustics. The gain VU meter helps you dial in the right setting based on the particular characteristics of your onboard pickup. It's as if the designers identified all the problem-spots of using conventional DI boxes in live settings and whittled down tailor-made solutions.
Absolutely not. The strength of this box is that is massages your signal to pro-level quality whether going into a PA or using it in the studio going direct into an interface and DAW. Recording in your bedroom and frustrated by trying to sing and play at the same time with only two mics? This is a great solution. Hearing a guitar equipped with LR Baggs' Anthem pickup system (blended mic and piezo) going into the Session DI through a DAW, not a PA, it's hard to tell whether it's been mic'ed or not. This is particularly useful for noisy recording situations like a city apartment, a room with humming A/C or a house full of kids/pets.
The Venue DI is a bit more comprehensive, with more fine-grained EQ shaping and an onboard tuner. It's meant to be a complete, one stop solution for dialing in your sound, regardless of the venue or guitar sending the signal. The Session DI is more focused in its intent: to impart professional studio quality tone to your acoustic guitar. It's more for people who already have their EQ figured out and their guitar tuned up and ready, whether with the onboard pre-amp or by other means.
Yes. It was designed with the full spectrum of acoustic pickups in mind. It's going to sound great either way, but it's mind blowing with the LR Baggs Anthem pickup.
