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Acoustic modeling meets acoustic guitars
Why should electric guitarists have all the fun when it comes to digitally modeled sound? Isn't there just as much quest for variety, experimentation, and a spirit of technological adventurousness from those of us who have round holes in the tops of our guitars? Apparently D-TAR thinks so, and has released the Mama Bear, a digital modeling preamp for acoustic guitars.
But doesn't a review like this belong in a magazine like Guitar Player or Frets? Keep reading. The ability of a single instrument to sound like multiple guitars - and most importantly, to do so convincingly - isa valuable tool for any studio that records acoustic guitars. As a bonus. Mama Bear also offers a lot for onstage use.
OVERVIEW
The Mama Bear features proprietary AGE (Acoustic Guitar Emulation; see "AGE Before Beauty" sidebar page 52) modeling technology. Driven by a 32-bit, 10OMHz floating-point 600MFLOPS microprocessor. Mama Bear emulates the sounds of classic, iconic guitars - including parlors, orchestra models, dreadnoughts, jumbos, resonators, and more. You can use the Mama Bear in two distinct ways:
* Correct, optimize, and enrich the tone of your existing acoustic
* Transform your guitar into an entirely different instrument - convert, say, your muddy-mellow dreadnought into a brassy biscuit-resonator blues axe or a sizzling Selmer/Maccaferri gypsy jazzer
Either way, the easy-to-use Mama Bear is tons of fun, and provides a wide variety of realistic, usable acoustic-guitar emulations . . . but it's not just a onetrick pony.
IT'S A PREAMP
In addition to modeling. Mama Bear has the usual signal-prepping features you'd expect from a quality acoustic guitar preamp. The front panel offers a single 1/4" hi-Z input (4.7M) and two continuous-level controls: Input, to match your guitar's strength to the box's processing circuitry, and Output, which does not affect the level from the XLR balanced out but does affect the 1/4" output, as an onstage monitoring benefit. Five switches provide on/off (with LED), phase, mute, analog low-cut (for eliminating rumble), and bypass functions, all of which come into play when wrangling acoustic signals (there's also an Overload indicator LED). The back panel features separate 1/4" and XLR mono outputs. There's also a ground lift switch and a...