Epiphany

Minor epiphany for me this weekend. I’ve had a pickup fitted to my new Kallquist guitar and had a small gathering of muso friends. One of them is a luthier and he was interested to hear how the pickup (LR Baggs Anthem) sounded with my acoustic amp (AER). I had played it briefly and was happy with the sound.

When I played it much more over the weekend with my friends, I noticed how sloppy my playing was when amplified. While I live for the chance to perform publicly at open mics and such, I normally rehearse unplugged except when I know an open mic is coming up.

So today I rehearsed for well over an hour plugged into the amp and was amazed at how quickly it improved my playing. Because the sloppy bits were much more obvious, it was easy (relatively) to tidy up my playing and concentrate on playing cleaner.

So my epiphany was that playing unplugged made it easier for me to be sloppy.

Going forward I’ll be rehearsing amplified a lot more than previously.

Another thing that it helped with with is related. The Kallquist has a slightly narrower nut and string width at the saddle, correspondingly I was getting string buzz with my fingers at times crowding the adjacent string when fretting various chords. I had expected that to mostly be gone by now as I’ve been playing the new guitar almost exclusively for about 2 months now, yet I’d noticed it was still a problem. The amplification highlighted it much better so it made my playing cleaner overall.

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