FishmanToneDEQ Acoustic Instrument Preamp with Effects

I have no problem recommending this product. It's not perfect but it does the job. I've been a Fishman fan for a long time and started out with the early version of the Aura. They know how to create a nice UST/acoustic guitar tone at loud but pleasing levels. Ultimately this takes your guitar and makes it louder and smoother put retains the natural sound.On the 'pros' side the EQ Compression and Boost are worth the price. The preamp does a nice job to give the guitar that sparkle. The effects are simple and a little goes a long way. The output runs to the house mixer with no discernible hum. There is no real learning curve as you can pretty much take it out of the box and dial in a nice tone almost immediately.On the con side the effects are grouped with "time" and "envelope" grouped together rather than individual tweakable effects. This means you have to select either reverb or delay. Also the input and output on the back should be on the back rather than the sides. But it's a minor annoyance as for my purposes as I default to a little delay and tremolo to give the sound a little atmosphere.The buttons are nicely spaced so you can hit it on stage on fly no problem. I do recommend getting the barefoot buttons to make it more foot friendly.But with all that I play high end acoustic Martin/Gibson guitar all the time. This unit is not designed to create over the top crazy effects. The bang for the buck is when you just want to get a little smoothness, some minimal compression to the acoustic guitar with the ability to pop in some gain for a lead solo.And actually it looks cool.

I’m an old guitar player who’s been playing and gigging for over 50 years and currently play about 150 gigs per year. I’ve been through every combination of effects and amps over the years from boutique pedals to all in ones. The past 5 years have seen me move from bands to acoustic soloist playing more rocky stuff than folky and I’ve become focused on lightening my load when gigging. I use a Boss RC300 looper to build songs live on the fly with no pre recording of loops. I perform thru a Bose L1 Model 2 so it’s as good as you get on the output side. My main gigging guitars are Composite Acoustics and occasionally one of my Taylor’s.The Fishman Tonedeq leaves me wanting for nothing. I was using a Boss ME80 for the past few years and tho it was OK, it wasn’t really voiced for acoustic guitar so it never sounded quite right. All I want in life these days is a bit of reverb, sometimes some chorus, a little compression and simple EQ and this pedal has it all and nothing more. The trem is good enough that I put my Fulltone Supa-Trem Into the old gear box. All of my settings are at my feet so if I’m playing through a house PA, I can tweak on the fly. It’s very simple and the effects are very useable and not too over the top to the point of being useless. The boost is great when switching from a strumming song to fingerpicking or when adding a different tone to a layer into the looper. Within a minute of plugging this in, I knew I had found my pedal soul mate. It sounded spectacular right out of the box.The DI and 1/4” out are brilliant. I split the signal to 2 channels into my Bose Tonematch, set 1 channel for my CA guitar and the second to a different patch giving me 2 distinct signals that I can mute in or out as needed. I set the second one with a more compressed and punchy electric sound for solos over looped parts as I build the song. I keep my Tonematch on my mic stand for live performances so this is super quick and easy.My entire live has been a pursuit of “that tone” and my current rig with the Tonedeq in the middle gives me exactly what I have been dreaming of forever. If you’re serious about useable tone, this is the holy grail.

This is a very powerful piece of equipment with plenty of features, reverb, chorus, delay, everything you need to dial in your sound for your venue. I had a solo show where it was just me and guitar, so I needed some effects to help me sound fuller.The choice to simplify the number of dials in exchange for some inflexibility in dialing in precise custom effects is, I think, the right one for me. From a performance perspective, I can, in 1 second, switch effects to my preferred setting. It was a choice that I think many musicians will appreciate, but not all.It does feel a bit cheap, both light and plastic everywhere, but for the 250ish I got it used, I'm loving it.

I have been playing live acoustic shows for the past 20 or so years. Always in search of that perfect balance of volume tone and mix with my voice. I have used many pedals in my quest for perfection and I always felt it could be better. So I plugged this into my rig and made some adjustments to the settings on the top of the unit. A little reverb and adjusted the tone. At first it seemed like I wasn’t getting the volume that I was used to. Digging a little deeper there is a trim dial on the right side of the unit. I use a LR Baggs Anthem pickup in most of my acoustic guitars. So I cranked that little trim button around and that did the trick. I have a couple other guitars with different pickups and so the trim level is very useful in dialing in the perfect volume in the mix. Even better there is a bass frequency cutoff that works very well in eliminating feedback. Once I got it all dialed in it sounded amazing. I have other tone pedals. An empress deluxe, an lr baggs di venue and an old zoom pedal which I used for quite a long time. The main focus I had when I bought this was getting my tone perfect and mission accomplished. Out of all the pedals I mentioned this is the best one period. It does everything I always thought a tone pedal should do.