DREW KRAG: What's up gearheads? It's Drew Krag again. Today we are joined with the Fishman Loudbox 100. Now, this is an acoustic guitar amplifier but also has the capabilities of plugging in a condenser microphone, which we'll be talking about in a minute. This guitar features an 8" speaker and a 1" tweeter. It's 100 watts, which is a awful lot of power for such small speakers, and we're going to be talking about why or why not that's effective, and the other feature basically Fishman made this amp for one reason. I think they finally starting reading these letter they were getting from disgruntled folk artists all over the place who are tired of going to the open mic and dealing with very crappy sound systems and they wanted a unit where they could do everything on one, plug in their microphone, plug in their guitar, get a nice mix, get some feedback issues solved, and, you know, get some digital effects there if needed, be able to do it all in one box, and be able to lift it without breaking your arm, so that's kind of where they were coming from when they built this amp. So if that's you, if you're a folk artist or a blues artist who could use these acoustic instruments and sings or works with a singer and you're looking for a solution, something an alternative to large, bulky sound systems that feed back and are often too -- more power than you need for an acoustic sound, this might work for you. So let's walk through it.

Basically, if you look at the front of this amp, you can see there's two channels. There's two inputs right here, 1/4" inputs. The first channel is on the very top, the second channel is in the bottom here. The second channel does feature an XLR input which has phantom power capabilities. That's a really nice feature. A lot of vocalists prefer to use condenser mics even performing live. I know that EV makes some really nice vocal live condenser microphones. A lot of vocalists like to use that so it's good to have that option. It saves you from having to buy a phantom power adapter, which is just another thing you have to carry around on a gig, and again that's what they were trying to eliminate with this amp.

So as we move along, we have our two 1/4" inputs for each channel. Each one has a 10-dB pad which is nice. It allows you to hook up multiple different types of instruments from different dynamic levels to it. If you don't know, a pad is just it lowers the overall volume of the input 10 dB so it makes for a more versatile amp. Then we also have our gain knob, very standard. This is your input gain setting. We're gonna be experimenting a little bit with tone a little bit later so we'll be talking more about this knob. We have a three-band parametric EQ for each channel, low, mid, and high, which is pretty standard. We have an anti-feedback knob for each channel, which is a nice feature. We'll be talking about that in a minute, and then this I really like. We got a phase button for each channel. It's not a phaser. What it does is it inverts the wave, so let's say you're really particular about your acoustic sound. You like tlo use the pickup inside the acoustic guitar but you also like to mic it up and mix or blend the signals. Sometimes, when you're doing stuff like that, you may encounter phase problems where one wave counteracts the other wave and they end up cancelling each other out and your end result is a very thin sound. You push one of those buttons and your problem is solved, so this is a nice live solution to phase problems, so that's a great feature.

We also have an effects level knob which controls the amount of effects inside the actual Fishman unit, the depth of the effects I should say, and this other level, effects level knob controls the master level of the effect, so you have like a way to mix the effects in and then you have the depth of the effects, so you can adjust both those.

And then right in between here is your effect settings. You have two hall reverbs, a chorus, and some plate reverbs as well, which is really good for vocals and snare drums ironically, and then here you have your master volume at the very end. You also have a master mute. That's actually a really nice feature. If you ever have the feedback problems and you don't know which knob to turn down, you can just hit the mute if you’re not sure which channel is feeding back or something like that. That mutes everything so that's a really good feature to have.

So let's play a little bit through this. Right now, we are using the direct out on this so we haven't mic'ed up the amp itself so you're not actually going to be hearing the speakers. You're going to be hearing the direct out of the amp. So it's going to sound a little different.

Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of 8" speakers. I find them kind of difficult to mic up, but that's not what these speakers were designed to do. They were designed to provide you with a stage volume, and you use the direct outs to plug in into an even bigger sound system if needed. So, we're just going to go through. I have this Gibson right here.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS ACOUSTIC GUITAR UNPROCESSED THROUGH THE FISHMAN LOUDBOX 100]

So not bad, very clean acoustic sounds. I'm going to experiment with the gain a ;little get and we can hear what kind of tonal variations that's going to cause.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS ACOUSTIC GUITAR UNPROCESSED THROUGH THE FISHMAN LOUDBOX 100]

So as I crank it up a little bit more, I can turn the master down to compensate for it.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS ACOUSTIC GUITAR THROUGH THE FISHMAN LOUDBOX 100]

So it seems to get a little bit more rich, a little bit fatter of a tone. If I turn the gain down a little bit, it's going to probably sound a little bit thinner.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS ACOUSTIC GUITAR UNPROCESSED THROUGH THE FISHMAN LOUDBOX 100]

You may notice a couple of the strings on this guitar aren't as loud as others. Got to hand it to Gibson. That's not really very good pickup design for this guitar. The nickel strings aren’t as loud as the steel strings. That could be a problem but that's off the topic.