TIM JOYCE: Hi. I'm Tim Joyce. I'm the retail director, and I run the Old Town School Music Store at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.

Another product that's come out in the past year or so is the Fishman Aura pedal, which is an acoustic imaging pedal. Now what they've done is they have recorded guitars with certain microphones and made these presets and what you end up doing is you plug your guitar in, the pedal can sort of figure out what's lacking in your guitar compared to the sort of the recording that they have logged inside the pedal, and then it makes up the difference for you and gets the sound of the acoustic guitar to sort of match that specific microphone that they recorded it with, and we can take a listen here and you can see the difference.

The first thing we'll do is we'll just go and listen to this Alvarez guitar with just the pickup from the guitar itself and then we'll go all the way over and blend in the Fishman pedal.

[TONY POLECASTRO PLAYING AN ALVAREZ ACOUSTIC GUITAR WITH THE FISHMAN AURA PEDAL BYPASSED THEN ENGAGED]

So there's definitely a difference there, you know, and you can hear this is a really great pedal for somebody who's, again, going into an open mic, or even a professional musician who wants a little different sound. Now what we'll do is cycle through some of the presets that are in here. There are 16 presets. The really interesting thing about this is that if you can record your guitar, send the files to Fishman, and they'll send you files back and then you can program your pedal for your specific guitar and your specific sound with all these microphones. It's really quite cool and very interesting new technology. So now we'll go through and I'll just click through some of the presets so you can hear the difference.

[TONY POLECASTRO PLAYING AN ALVAREZ ACOUSTIC GUITAR WITH THE FISHMAN AURA PEDAL ENGAGED, TIM JOYCE SCROLLING THROUGH PRESETS]

So, you can hear there's definitely a wide variety of difference in there, and some sound good, some don't sound so good, but you then figure out the sound you're looking for. If you're a person that likes to play and have to have that sort of more like twangy sounding guitar sound, you can use this and get that sound. The nice thing is you can use this and go directly right into the PA. It makes your life a lot easier, and once you figure out, you know, your favorite presets on there, you can just go with it, take it to the gig, and plug right in.

TONY POLECASTRO: The Fishman Aura is a great pedal for somebody that has a guitar already and a pickup already and they're just kind of looking for a different sound, and this is a great way to go about it. You get essentially 16 different sounds without going to buy 16 different instruments.

TIM JOYCE: The other nice thing about this is that they have made that this isn't just like a pedal that you, you know, for any guitar you just buy, plug in, and go. They have like taken the time to actually, you know, set it up, record a dreadnought guitar with all these specific microphones, so there's the pedal that's the dreadnought pedal, there's one that’s the nylon-string guitar pedal, there's one that's the orchestra-size guitar pedal, and there's a huge difference. You know, if you plugged the steel-string guitar into the nylon string one, I can guarantee you it's not going to sound good, and the same thing, so that's another nice option. You know, you can sort of focus right down and say I have this specific guitar, a classical guitar, and I want to get some different sounds out of it on stage or in the studio, you get the classic guitar Aura pedal and you're all set.

This is an Alvarez, you know, sort of top-of-the-starter-line of guitars, and I find that the higher up you go on guitars, the less you need to mess with the sound of it. Somebody's buying a guitar because they like that sound, you know, so when you're spending $3,000 on a guitar, you're buying it because you like that specific sound, and you're probably not going to go clicking through 16 presets to find the sound you want because you've already got it in that $3,000 guitar. Whether or not it makes a low-quality instrument sound better, I don't know for sure. Definitely, you know, there's definitely a difference in the sound. It definitely makes it more listenable, you know. It sometimes takes, you know, if you find the right preset for your guitar that's not the greatest, you know, number 14 might really make that guitar sound pretty okay on stage, you know.