Background. My existing setup involves an iPad Pro, a USB hub (for power), a mult-port USB dongle for the iPad, a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and a Marshall Stanmore Speaker (one of their home audio speakers, not guitar gear) connected by aux cable. I run all of my iPad audio through the Scarlett (it’s easier than turning Bluetooth on and off as required). For electric guitar, if I need the Scarlett to use Yousician or I route audio from Moises to my speaker for acoustic.
I’ve fancied an acoustic amp for a little while. Nothing fancy, just something to maybe add a little reverb to my sound. I wanted something to replace the Marshall speaker (which has an annoying 20 minute sleep “feature”) rather than have more gear. The Yamaha THR5A seems to be the answer.
It’s not been straightforward though. The moment I plugged in the Aux cable from my Focusrite I entered into a world of squawks and hissing. I noticed that if I took away the power from my USB-C hub the squawks went but my iPad needs power. The eventual solution has been to take my USB power brick out of the equation. My iPad and Focusrite are now in separate wall sockets and peace has broken out, phew!
I considered fancier amps with mic inputs but I can’t foresee the day that I’ll be needing that. For now, everything is working and sounding good, fingers crossed it stays that way!
The amp itself is tiny, 2x 5W I think but for my purposes it’s what I need and was inexpensive. In some ways the effect of playing an acoustic guitar into an amp is quite subtle, because it sounds like an acoustic guitar! First thought is that it’s not doing much… and then you turn the amp off, strum the guitar and find out it was doing quite a bit actually. For anyone wondering, the orange glow from the amp is just a light, no tubes and it isn’t red hot! It’s got reverb / delay, chorus and compression effects plus emulates different mic types that you can blend with the sound from the guitar pickup. There is a tap tempo option for some of the effects and it has a built-in tuner.