The Fishman Aura

My Comments About The Fishman Aura System

The Fishman Aura is a new technology in acoustic instrument amplification that I consider to be a quantum jump forward in making instruments sound natural and loud. It is a different sort of animal than any previous processor box, and is difficult to understand at first. To my ears, as somewhat of an acoustic purist, the signal-processing, EQ and pre-amp technology of the last 20 years has only succeeded in making the marginal and sometimes downright lousy-sounding piezo pickups sound somewhat less lousy, but I have never heard a pickup sound until now that I would call "rich" and "lush" or "lifelike." The door to a new era has been opened, and though it is only going to get better, the first sound images I have used with the first Aura boxes off the production line have immediately put me into a whole new world of stage sound, and can work just as well for anyone who takes the time to learn to operate and set up the Aura. There is no need to wait for the better version, though they will no doubt be here soon and be better. It already works and it works well.

IMPORTANT NOTE ADDED IN 2016: Unfortunately for fussy musicians, the original Aura that I have used for over 12 years has been discontinued, and it is not currently possible to do a lot of the specialized custom things that I write about in this article. It is not reasonable for every owner of the Aura device to get the Fishman company to spend an hour or two making, installing and tweaking custom Aura images for each instrument, so the current Spectrum Aura boxes merely have hundreds of pre-made images in them, and you have to spin the dials and do a lot of trial and error and hope you can find one that works well with your instruments. My experience is that none of them ever sounds as amazing as a well-made custom image, which is unfortunate for the musicians who don't have the better technology and for the audiences who listen to them. The success of the Aura technology seems to be spawning other types of similar products, and the sound quality of plugged-in acoustic instruments in general is still slowly going up in spite of this set-back in progress.

I swore that I would never perform without a microphone and that I would never be happy with just a pickup, and now I am happily doing just that. I use the Aura onstage with 3 different acoustic guitars, a mandolin, banjo, autoharp, resonator guitar, mandocello, and people regularly come running up after my shows to ask me what I am using for sound reinforcement. It is as simple as stepping on a footswitch to jump from one instrument to the another.
It appears to be similar to what is called "modeling" technology, but is quite a different approach. Modeling grew out of electric guitars, and the way it works does not apply that well to acoustic guitars. The playing field is not at all like electric guitars, where the body of the guitar is quite inert; the pickups are sensing only the strings, and thus behave very much like other guitars of the same brand when you plug them into amps and effects. If 30 people all plug their Fender Telecasters (electric guitars) into Twin Reverb amps, a very similar sound will result. If 30 people all plug their acoustic Martin D-28's with a Matrix saddle pickup into a PA system, their sounds will be quite different from each other, and this is the essence of the problem.

The modeling pre-amps are just fancy EQ boxes that store information about what a particular amp does to a signal that goes into it. It is possible to make an EQ setting that somewhat represents what a Marshall amp sounds like or what a Mesa Boogie amp sounds like. This information is obtained from measuring the sound waves that come out of the amp. It works because the starting point is nearly the same for all the guitar signals, and because the signal contains only string information, and there are no guitar body resonances and phase issues to interfere. But you can't do that with something as complex and varied as an acoustic guitar, since the bodies and the pickups vary greatly. There are too wide a range of sounds from even one make and model of acoustic guitars. Acoustic guitars, even if they are the same brand and model, are quite different from each other, and the pickups you put in them will most likely behave differently from each other even if they are the same brand, which adds a second level of variation. This will mean that doing the same processing to signals from 30 different acoustic guitar pickups will yield wildly variant final results. When I plug my acoustic guitar with my pickup into a "modeling" pre-amp, what I have heard sounds quite confused and unnatural, and I have not liked what I have heard. Some settings sound a little better than without them, but it is not what I call a breakthrough. When you are on-stage with a vibrating and resonating acoustic guitar, no modeling technology I have heard delivers the full-bodied, lifelike sound I am after, and the Aura does.

The Aura takes a different approach. You plug your guitar pickup into a recording studio, and simultaneously mike the guitar, and record something that generates 2 different soundwaves, one from the pickup and one from the mike. The computer can then apply this information that tells it how the pickup signal differs from what a miked sound of that guitar would be, and apply it to the pickup signal. It has very sophisicated sound-shaping power-- over 2000 parametic EQ's (among other things) and it has enough processing power to modify your pickup signal in real time, while you are playing, into something that sounds dramatically more like your instrument than your pickup does. Because a plugged-in guitar in a performing situation is very alive and resonant, the way it works must be very specific. It does not make a Martin sound like a Taylor. It can really only make your guitar sound more like itself. It works by simply by plugging your pickup into a box. And there's a switch to bypass it, so you and your listeners can instantly A-B the Aura and hear the Before and After. It makes cynical non-believers shake their heads, and I can name you a pretty long list of people who have bought one within days or even hours after hearing mine.

The Aura does not contain the sound of your guitar-- it contains information that represents the difference bteween what your guitar pickup and what a mike in front of that guitar sound like. If you make an Aura image from your guitar, it can possibly sound great with another guitar if that guitar has a similar difference between what its mike and pickup signals sound like. This is a little confusing at first to understand. I have made an Aura image for my banjo pickup, and it makes it sound a lot like my banjo when I play the banjo through it. If I plug my guitar into that, it does not make the guitar sound like a banjo. It just applies the same information that works for the banjo-pickup-to-banjo-mike transformation, and the end result when you play a guitar through is pretty awful and un-banjo-like. For people who have seen synthesizers turn an electric guitar into a pipe organ or a flute sound, one would think the Aura could make your acoustic guitar sound like something quite different. Because the body of the guitar and the top are alive and vibrating, their resonances clash with the electronically altered signals and with the sound coming from the speaker, and wolf tones and a lot of feedback usually result when you play through the wrong Aura setting.

Ideally the Aura should be "taught" what your individual instrument and your pickup sound like and then can "morph" the pickup waveform into something that resembles the mike waveform. The end result is of course dependent on what guitar was used to make the sound image you are using to enhance your sound, how it differs from the guitar you will use to play back with, how you input this information about the guitar, which includes your choice of mikes, playing and miking techniques. Those of us who use the Aura are still experimenting, and steadily improving the final sound that comes out of the speakers. The Aura uses specific sound images made from individual guitars, rather than inspecific models that generalize and say certain brands or shapes of guitars have certain tonal properties. To make such a custom image, you must record a sound sample with your guitar and pickup and a mike simultaneously, and send it to Fishman, they can make a midi file which is then installed into the Aura box with a computer, a midi connection and a free downloadable program available on their web site at www.Fishman.com. This is not easy to do currently, and it is something you can only do with help from someone who knows how to do it.

The Aura is sold as a guitar device, but I am using it very effectively with autoharp, banjo, mandolin, bouzouki, mandocello, and resonator guitar, and have just done the first tests with a fiddle, and it seems to work equivalently with all of them. 12 of the 16 sound images in the Aura can be user-programmed, and their web site contains many downloadable files that you can install into your Aura even if you can't yet make the custom files from your individual instruments. I have also done a lot of experimenting in trying to make a particular guitar sound good. Those of us who perform are used to the randomness of the way some guitars just seem to sound better on stage than others. I have carefully worked with 2 new Dana Bourgeois guitars recently, in hopes that I could make them work as stage guitars. (My experience has been that really resonant and good guitars that are great at home and in the studio do not always amplfy well.) The same thrings that make them great guitars can make them feed back too easily on stage, and you really do not usually see performers using the finest guitars on stage. I have recently worked with these guitars and made them sound incredible when plugged in, and have now concluded that the Aura technology, which can make cheap guitars sound better, can also be used to make really nice guitars sound really nice on stage too. This is comforting.

The Aura technology is designed to use with a saddle-style piezo pickup, and has significantly more limited effectiveness with a magnetic, body-mount or bridge-plate pickup. Since it is just a box you plug into, there is no need to get rid of anything you already have, and it is as easy as plugging into it and playing once you have set up the parameters and loaded or selected the sound images. It has volume and tone controls, a bypass switch & mute switch, a built-in tuner, compressors and direct box, so it is a self-contained unit. It is pretty heavy as stomp-boxes go, sits on the floor, and is designed to operate with footswiches. It is somewhat awkward to operate its knobs on the floor, and will need some refinement of its interface before it is perfect, but for a first generation new technology it really works well.
The Aura technology, surprisingly, is not confused by playing fast or hard or percussively or bending strings, playing slide etc. The most percussive styles of playing such as hard-driving flatpicking or string-snapping blues have always been the hardest ones to capture with a pickup, even though they are the loudest sounds in the living room or over a mike. The Aura does an amazing job with them, and I am now performing with styles of playing I had stopped using on stage because they amplified so poorly.

After using a "Blender" stage set-up for the last 15 years, combining a pickup with an on-board mini-mike on the instrument, I have been pretty happy, though when you need to get louder, you have to mix in increasing amounts of the less-musical pickup. The mini mike also causes more feedback problems, and is quite sensitive to wind noise in outdoor gigs.
Rather than ship you an empty box and expect you to make your own presets, Fishman installs 16 different sound images that were made with a variety of guitars, pickups and mikes. They are a nice collection of images spanning a wide range of instruments, pickups and mikes, and they also have made available a larger number of downloadable presets on their web site that you can experiment with and load into the Aura with the free utility they offer on their web site. (You also need a computer, an internet connection, a $30 USB-to-MIDI connector box and a MIDI cable.) It is a crapshoot whether or not one of these will be good for your guitar, and actually unlikely that any of them will be perfect. Every time I have tried, there has been at least one preset that sounded quite nice on a random guitar, and it is quite possible that you could be completely happy with one of them; I know several people who are very happily performing with installed pre-set sound images. I have two guitars, however, of the same brand and model, with the same pickups in them, and the sound image I made for each of them sounds unacceptable when played through the one made for the other. I have a friend with the same make and model guitar and pickup, and their guitar did not sound great with either sound image I had made for both my "matching" guitars. It is a very individual thing. If you take the time to make a special one for your guitar & pickup combination, the result can be downright astonishing, and I urge anyone who gets an Aura box to do this, even though it is somewhat tricky to do.

The problems of performing live with the Aura are much larger than those of recording, since an acoustic guitar will feed back when it is near a live speaker, and if the resonances are excessive they can cause things to sound strange. You need to experiment a lot with the EQ, phase, and above all the relative mix of the pickup signal and the Aura-modified one, and the combinations you choose will be quite different for performing vs. recording.
I have made test recordings where I recorded simultaneously with both the pickup and Aura system, and with a nice mike in front of the guitar, to compare the two sounds. Even when using a guitar of mine where I never liked the pickup at all, I was able to make a recording, where it is virtually impossible to tell the difference between the track recorded with the mike and the one recorded with the Aura. It is literally that powerful a device. It also has the power to make a mess of your sound if you have the presets and the knobs in the wrong place, and the whole thing requires a great deal of care and patience.

Finally, I assure you that I am not deluding myself or jumping to sudden conclusions; I have done months of experimenting. I have set up 2 entire systems on stage at concerts, so I could switch back to my old setup instantly if I didn't like something, and I have spent hundreds of hours refining my use of the Aura, and compared it in all sorts of gig situations, and recorded shows to compare sounds. When I played at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood, which has the biggest PA I have ever played through indoors, the sound man came running out of the booth to tell me that that was the best acoustic guitar sound he had ever heard in 20 years. (And that was after him not liking me very much because I was not using his DI boxes or his mikes, etc.) I am not being paid to use the Aura, or to say good things about it. The acoustic music world very much needs to get louder and to sound better, and this technology is the first real breakthrough I have seen in over 20 years, and I feel that the world of acoustic music will be greatly improved by the use of this and subsequent technologies.