Audio Geekery Review by Kenny Schick (Nashville TN)
Trace Audio developed a new preamp, the Amulet Ultra, they sent me a prototype to check out and test… I love it!
Standard cable, can run off battery or phantom power – and really configurable. Pictured are the old system (blue box on top) and the new, below (pickups are the same and still in guitar) – better/easier install method than original system, and more budget friendly as well!
I never played acoustic guitar much before about 2004. Always in a loud band playing electric guitar or sax. I was quite unaware of how big the whole singer-songwriter scene really was, but at a point, I got tired of dealing with the whole band dynamic, and I wondered if I could just figure out how to perform solo with an acoustic guitar.
To work the whole deal out, I started going to open mics, and I started listening to solo acoustic musicians to learn. One thing that was problematic for me was the sound of acoustic guitars plugged in—just didn’t sound of feel the same—and it just isn’t, but there was a whole world of folks looking for the best solution.
Those under the saddle pickups generally sounded quacky and didn’t really capture the whole guitar, so percussive playing was lost. For my style and tastes, soundboard transducers seemed the best option.
I started with K and K pickups, which I still think are great. But I’d heard of a company near my home town in California that was making some pretty high end systems. Folks like Jackson Browne, Beck, Neil Young, Sheryl Crow and Tom Waits were using them. It was an expensive system, named the Amulet-made by Trance Audio Inc that used a proprietary cable and preamp — I kept a spare cable, but if you ever forgot’em, or broke them, you were out of luck.
I put this system in my Martin HD 28, and it was grea. I did wreck a few cables in hilarious ways, but I got to know Gary and Laurel (she’d been a fan of my band Dot 3 back in the 80s!), and he fixed them up for me, being local and all.
When we moved to Nashville, our first rental was a surprise in a gross way… it came with pets… mice… well apparently, those special cables were a delicacy — because they were the only ones that the mice chewed into chunks. I was able to make one out of the 3 I had, and I wasn’t playing out really, so that was ok.
Since the original system, Trace had developed a new preamp that took a 1/4” cable, recently I contacted them about that, and they told me they had a new system in the works — the Amulet Ultra. They sent me a prototype to check out and test… I love it!
Standard cable, can run off battery or phantom power – and really configurable. Pictured are the old system (blue box on top) and the new, below (pickups are the same and still in guitar)… go check them out at tranceaudio.com. oh… to add… better/easier install method than original system, and more budget friendly as well!