Question about Q-Clone

I'm afraid you'll have no luck trying to use Q-Clone to create an acoustic guitar sound. What Q-Clone does is basically send a sign wave into a device that has an input to accept a sound (such as an equalizer, a reverb, or a speaker) and then take the resulting sonic output and generates an EQ curve from it.

There is no way you could send the sign wave from Q-Clone into an acoustic guitar. An acoustic guitar is an instrument that only produces sound when played; you don't plug in an input cable, send a sound wave through it, and then hear the soundwave from the guitar.

Orren

 

Q-Clone is basically a limited preset-orientated convolution processor. Convolution works by extrapolating the parameters involved in a linear sound transformation.

You feed a sine sweep (usually 20hz-20khz over 20 seconds or so) into a system - such as an audio processor like an EQ or a speaker with a mic in front of it - and record the output of the sound through that system. This causes time/frequency changes from speaker cone colouration, room reflections, signal loss or gain in the circuit etc. You deconvolve this recorded output into an impulse which you can apply to any audio signal - you've effectively "sampled" the colouration of the environment recorded. For example, if you applied that impulse to a sine sweep, you should (theoretically) make the sine sweep sound like the sweep you recorded. It doesn't work for non-linear effects like modulation or harmonic distortion, but is quite effective at capturing room sounds, reverbs, delay, phase changes, speaker colourations and EQ.

Now, why you'd pay $1000 for Q-Clone when you can get the fully controllable and multi-impulse Pristine Space by Voxengo for less than $200 is truly beyond me.

I'm not sure how the impulsing in the Aura was done (assuming that it works by convolution), since you can't really accurately take a sine sweep or spike of a piezo pickup. But given the mediocre results, I suspect Fishman never quite figured it out either.

 

I recorded a Lowden with a Fishman piezo through the Aura (I used about 20 different settings) and compared it to the same acoustic miced up. It sounds nothing at all like it, even after matching the frequency spectrums. I don't know how much the Aura is retailing for at the moment, but when I looked at it, it was around €500 here. That's €350 too much, imo. It a nice versatile EQ modeller, but it really didn't seem to succeed in doing what it claims to do - make a piezo pickup sound like a miced acoustic. The sound that comes out is still undeniably and very distinctly a piezo signal with heavy EQ.

Personally, if I was spending that kind of money on a DI, I'd get an Avalon U5.