So true. It’s kind of at odds with the price of guitars themselves. I could buy ALL of these options combined for less money than the recently released Dave Grohl Epiphone guitar!
I’m certainly with you that I want to spend zero time mixing and removing noise although for my current purposes a bit of background noise is no problem because it’s mostly about hearing what I play along with the backing track and any of these methods will help me do this. In some ways the lack of faffing is what took me from electric guitar to acoustic guitar. I was in danger of spending too much time playing with sounds when I still needed to learn to play! Some of these choices will have a little bit of faff initially but once set up they should be easily repeatable so I’m ok with that
I can definitely relate! I started on electric about four years ago and at times found that I wasn’t really happy with my sound and would go down the rabbit hole of tweaking settings. Then almost two years ago I got an acoustic for the same reason as you. I played my acoustic almost exclusively for about a year. For the first couple of months, I sounded really terrible and felt like I almost had to start from scratch. With an acoustic guitar, there’s nowhere to hide.
Eventually, I was starting to make my acoustic sound good (Justin’s Strumming SOS lessons were a key part of this for me) and wanted to start recording (that’s where the Scarlett studio came in). After some of my forementioned frustrations with getting a good recording with the mic, I went back to my electric and found that I sounded a ton better.
I’m now spending about equal time on my electric and acoustic, playing each of them every day. I find that each of them challenges me in different ways and that the skills that get emphasized on one tend to help me on the other.
On the Scarlett Studio, I just checked out the 4th gen version and not only do you get an improved scarlett, but you also get an upgraded “pro” set of headphones. As I mentioned earlier, I have been very happy with the headphones I got with the 3rd gen. So, if the new ones are significantly better than you are getting a great value - essentially paying for the Scarlett and Headphones and getting the mic and cable for free.
Whichever gear you get, as long as it keeps you playing, it will help you reach your goals.
Just a small addition to the post. Depending on the type of pickup that you have on your acoustic guitar, you may not love the sound when directly plugged into the Focusrite. Some acoustic piezo pickups sound a little bit weird and are less forgiving when making small mistakes. In the end, I still prefer to play my acoustic unplugged and adjust the backing track level and/or my dynamic. Though, some acoustic guitars have really great pickup so you may have one.
As an update, I bought myself the Focusrite 2i2 studio bundle today (comes with mic and headphones) plus a mic stand.
I’ve gone down this route as it seems the most future proofed and covers a variety of scenarios such as playing via the mic or the guitar’s pickup. Unless I start a band (very unlikely at present) there’s not much I can’t do with this set up.
I’ve needed to re-organise where I play to accommodate this but for anyone who also read my learning log, you’ll have seen that playing on the sofa wasn’t the most ergonomic anyway.
In terms of my initial set-up I’ve found I can do all I need via my iPad Pro. I’ve been practicing via the Moises app for iPad and was quite keen to keep this option. It turns out there’s 2 different ways to achieve this, either just running Moises and using Direct mode on the 2i2 or loading up Garageband for iPad, picking the option for background running and then returning to Moises. (for those who don’t know Moises is good at looping sections and has auto chord recognition - which it mostly gets right - so while learning a song really helps with staying in time with chord changes even if you play slightly different chords to what it suggests). It looks like Garageband will do what I need for a good while as my DAW.
I suppose the thing to remember when playing with pre-recorded songs is that no two albums are recorded at the same volume. When setting up like this there’s going to be some tweaking just to balance the audio levels but at least I can do it now which was the thing I was struggling with when I created this thread. I feel almost professional with the big headphones on and a mic in front of me (even if I don’t sound it )
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