One of the best pieces of equipment I use on the road is the D-TAR “Mama Bear” acoustic guitar preamp. From the product’s web site:
For years, acoustic guitars have relied on pickups for amplification. One problem: Even the best acoustic guitars deliver an oversimplification of true acoustic tone complexity when amplified. Using something called AGE™ technology, Mama Bear takes your guitar into the digital realm, neutralizes the pickup, and then restores the natural body resonance. The result: now the finest acoustic guitars can sound like, well… themselves. Only louder.
Mama Bear is the work of Rick Turner, who also made the Renaissance RS-6 “ampli-coustic” guitar I play on stage, and Seymour Duncan.
Using a 32-bit computer that operates at very high speed, Mama Bear allows a player like me to deliver the sounds of 16 really great instruments, whose characteristics were thoroughly measured by Duncan & Turner and stuffed into this box.
Rick Turner forwarded the link to this review of Mama Bear by John Chappell in EQ Magazine. An excerpt:
The Target Instruments control offers 16 different instruments… that touch on all the great acoustic models in history. For this review, I used a Martin J-40M with a Martin Thinline 332 under-the-saddle piezo pickup. I immediately went to the more radical incarnations — the Tricone Resonator, Biscuit Blues Resonator, Gypsy Jazz, and Hollow Body Archtop Jazz — to test the modeling engine’s mettle.
I was blown away. These were not caricatures of those well-known instruments, but living, breathing renditions. If you really play in the style that suits the Target Instrument, you will be rewarded with rich sounds. For example, in #16, Tricone Resonator, I tuned to an open A and played bottleneck licks and really steeled out the metallic, ring-modulated sound of a vintage Regal RC-51. Then, switching over to #14, Gypsy Jazz, I brushed up on my staccato alternate picking and went through my Django transcriptions of “I Got Rhythm†and “Lady Be Good.†When it was time to mellow out a bit, I played Johnny Smith’s classic chord-melody version of “Moonlight in Vermont†using the Hollow Body Archtop Jazz setting. The well-rendered results from these settings actually helped inspire my playing.
Switching over to the more subtle applications, the Mahogany Dreadnought sounded a little sharper and more focused for single-line passages than the Rosewood Dreadnought, which was warmer and fuller for chords and arpeggio work. Though the sounds went from the delightfully canny to the realistic, my only quibble is that I had to run both the input and output levels quite high to approximate the levels of other preamps in my studio. Fortunately, the Mama Bear is quiet, so running it hot doesn’t introduce any noise; I wouldn’t hesitate to use the Mama Bear in an exposed, critical-listening setting.
Chappell notes in his conclusion that “There’s no footswitch operation — either for bypass or stepping between Target Instruments. That, with the table-top housing and front-faced control configuration, makes Mama Bear more studio-friendly than stage-friendly.” And I agree with him on that – it would be great to have ready access to the “bypass” switch so I could play the perfectly wonderful “plain” sound of the RS-6 and then kick in a preset from Mama Bear in mid-song. But it’s great way to make many sounds come out of one instrument, and that is a very nice ability to have when you do looping.
From D-TAR‘s web site:
D-TAR (de-tar): 1: n The logical union of the world’s leading pickup builder and the world’s foremost authority on acoustic instrument amplification. 2: n The new company whose motto is: “with respect to acoustic tone”