Fishman Loudbox: good amp for resoph. guitars

[Tom Ensink]

Hi everybody:

I do not spend too much time on this part of the forum, but I wanted to share this information with you.

Last weekend I had my first gig in which I had to play my Melobro resophonic guitar live in an electric band.

The day before I compared an AER (forgot the type) against the new Loudbox amp made by Fishman. The AER has a very broad tone character, which is nice if you hear it stand alone, but may present problems if you are in a loud electric band. The Loudbox has a very tight tonal character which cuts right through the stage level.

I was pleasantly suprised to learn that my Melobro sounded better on the Fishman than on the AER, even stand alone! Also, on stage the guitar really sounded good and loud enough. The Fishman has an anti feedback shelve button, so we could reasonably control the feedback (although the resophonic part of the guitar obviously picks up a lot of the stage sound).

The Fishman had to work hard, I was almost at 75% of its power (didn't use an external preamp), but I could hear it reasonably well on stage, while the FOH engineer was very pleased with a hot signal from the line out of the Fishman Loudbox.

The only disadvantage of the Fishman that I have encountered so far is that (other than the AER) the Fishman has no mute button per channel. And I am not sure if it has 48V phantom power for the microphone input, but in my case I would probably not use a condenser mic in a live situation.

I would like to know your experience with this amp.

Greetings from the Netherlands,

Tom

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Franklin D10, Derby D10, Emmons D10 (1967), ZB Custom S10, Melobar Teleratt and Melobro, Nashville 112, Session 400, Evans 200, Twin Reverb 1980