(guitar music)
(guitar playing)
- Fender as a company knows electric guitars.
And if we had to talk to someone or work with someone
or partner with someone when we started this project,
they're really knows the sonics of acoustic guitars
and how to electrify and record those sounds.
There was no one but Fishermen
Tim and I have both known Larry for 30 years plus years.
And so, the call to Larry was an easy one.
His first call back was, "you're nuts. You are nuts.
This will never work.
Mike, awesome. Are you in?"
- when he told me what he wanted to do
with a five-way switch and two knobs,
I told me he's out of his mind.
(guitar music)
(guitar playing)
- [Man] One of the things that might be a misnomer
about the acoustic Sonic is you can look at it
and think maybe it's just a very thin bodied acoustic guitar
or maybe you think it's guitar that has some technology
in it where this is just kind of the shell
or husk that the technology is doing all the work.
And neither are true.
This was a very symbiotically built guitar
that is a harmonious balance
between the guitar itself and the electronics,
so neither are mutually exclusive.
You can take one and put it in a different guitar,
it's not gonna work.
You can't take the electronics out and have this work.
The harmony occurs where you plug it in
and then you have some of the electronics driving the sound
but it's also based
upon what the guitar itself is also doing.
So those two things are operating together
and kind of live mixing a sound for you.
- Brian explained what kind of voices
and features they're looking for.
We had to design acoustic sounds
that would reside in that guitar that were convincing
and sound like a variety of classic, full body instruments
of different shapes and different words.
And I said, well, we can do most of it already.
We have the acoustic imaging technology
that we've been working with for 15 years.
And we've learned a lot
about how to emulate different body styles and things
of that nature, but there was some pretty stiff requirements
on the electric side.
This had to perform through a Cusco terrarium
or a four-inch PA.
Of course you can play any of the Chusan Sears
or the pedal switcher into electric camps,
but it had the requirement
that the player maybe singer song writer
would use it on a gig, primarily acoustic,
but for one or two tunes go into the electric realm
without him to change gear.
And that's where it started.
- [Man] One of the things that was challenging
is an instrument like this,
there's so many ways to play it.
And that's what people do with an amplified acoustic guitar.
Some people plug it into an electric amp.
Some people plug it into an acoustic amp.
Some people plug it into a DI or a PA or into a board.
And there's so many ways to do that.
So we also had to sonically sculpt it.
So there was no bad way or wrong way for people to play it.
However, it's optimized really on the acoustic side
for being played direct into a PA or directed to a board.
- It was a big challenge, but we took a deep dive,
got the whole team here involved,
and that was the beginning.
(guitar playing)
- [Tim] The jazz master is the largest of the family.
It has like the deepest voice.
So it's not a baritone, but it certainly knows where
baritones sing.
And because of that structurally, we had a completely
different feel for the instrument,
a completely different Sonic experience, even acoustically
before there'd been any pickup designed
on our anything.
Acoustically, it was a much different instruments.
- The larger size created different resonances
then on the Telecaster or Stratocracy.
So we had to adjust our acoustic models to make up for that
because they really have to fit hand and glove
to work well together.
But the guitar designers really took care
of the major aspect of it.
Tim Shaw Brian's forward figured they painstakingly
tuned this guitar from the bracing to the sound whole port
to have the right resident qualities.
We never had a fight the instrument to get their electronics
to work.
- [Man] So a fair question would be
okay, so what's it doing?
Well fair enough. We can answer that.
At a basic level, this is a thin acoustic guitar.
So it's a holiday instrument with a braced spruce top on it.
So the first thing that happens when I start record
is the strings energy tries
to drag everything it can.
It push pushes on the bridge, loud enough
to be heard on my lap,
not loud enough, or judge halfway to Cleveland.
- [Man] This is our own proprietary
and actually patented sound's port that we use
which effectively works like a port of a speaker cabinet.
So it helps take the sound
and throw it out through the front of the guitar.
- [Man] There are three pickups in the guitar.
The hum bucker that you see, which was created just
for this guitar, an understandable transducer,
UST or people call them piezogenic pickup
and a Bonnie sensor that's mounted under the top
to the bridge plate that picks up all the vibration
of the top.
That don't work just by themselves.
When you switch through here, it's not as simple.
Oh, I'm on this one, I'm on that one,
I'm on that one or I'm in, I'm in combinations.
It's a variety of things in conjunction
or in concert with the future electronics down here
that allow us to deliver the wide variety sounds.
- In the middle position of this switch with the blonde knob
all the way turned down, we have an acoustic guitar voice
which has been tuned and curated for this instrument.
As we turn the blend knob up
we're gonna bring in the body sensor.
In doing so, all the tops and pops
in anything we do to hit the instrument
will come out and be live just as they would be
if you had a guitar with a microphone
and we're tapping on it.
Another position,
we might have a Dreadnought acoustic voice.
As we pan the blend knob to the opposite direction,
we might have a parlor guitar.
So we go from the sound of a big guitar.
Versus guitars perfectly happy to do.
This is out of a much smaller, more focused guitar.
And through that blend,
we're actually knitting those two images.
So we're, we've got this image knitting
with that damage, becoming that image.
And then on the final position
we've got the magnetic pickup through a signal chain
which includes in its original form and the amplifier
and speakers, and that's a mic cannon and a direct signal.
And then we can actually increase the gain
as if you're basically turning
up the volume on an electric hammer.
There's a whole lot of stuff going on,
99% of it you're not seeing.
- We had to take our knowledge
of everything we learned about all these variety
of guitars over the years
and build filter sets that emulated those guitars.
So what you hear in here is not anyone's guitar.
It's a image of what we've learned,
represents a type of guitar and the type of environment
with a certain type of microphone,
via a large diagram, small diagram, even or so forth.
And we developed a prototyping system
that was a series of outside boxes.
So we get to actually turn knobs
and get things right in the sweet spot
before we committed to an onboard circuit.
- Because we had the larger body to start with,
we were encouraged to take the instrument electrically
and through the fishermen sound engine
to different places than the other two guitars wanted to go.
(guitar music)
We knew we wanted a double coil pickup
because so many of the jazz master players,
a lot of these players had put piezogenic into it.
So we knew we wanted a bigger broader crunchier voice.
(guitar drift)
we kept changing what the pickup was capable of
and ended up with a pickup
which would be a quite high output pickup
than a regular instrument.
And again, it's listening to the instrument saying,
okay what do you wanna do?
And the guitar will basically tell you something.
And then you decide
if you and the guitar in agreement with that.
(guitar drift)
- Wow! That's cool.
That's cool. It's like very resonant.
Damn!
(laughing)
Wow! Okay.
It's funny because then you don't, you don't have to,
you don't have to like do that thing where
you like put your guitar
to the amp, like, like, come on, come on.
And you're not sure if you can rely on it.
That's pretty sick.
Well, I'm excited about this one
because so much of my music ranges
from meeting like fuzzy piezogenic electric guitar
to like needing an acoustic guitar.
So it's kind of exciting that we're just
like switching between all these different pickups.
I can have my electric, give me a true sound of an acoustic.
Not like an acoustic electric necessarily, but changing
between actual sounds that an electric guitar will give me
and a full body to acoustic guitar.
(guitar playing)
- I followed the development of the product all along
and was really amazed
at how the team overcame every single
kind of technical obstacle that was thrown their way.
At the very last kind of soundcheck
that we had with the guitar.
I knew I was gonna hear some great acoustic tones
because of all of the sophisticated modeling
that we'd worked on with humblers Electronics.
What completely took me by surprise
was the great electric tones that came out of this.
So I kinda knew then that this was actually
more than a great acoustic guitar.
It was actually something unique and different.
- [Man] It was a combination of technologies
and approaches that we took to get the features
that had been very clearly defined by Brian and Tim.
And that was actually the best part of the project.
We knew exactly what they wanted.
We weren't guessing all the way.
I said, I want a five-way switch and a blind control
so I can pan between different sounds.
And I want it to be absolutely usable without a user man.
Every sound had to work and I had to be totally intuitive.
And it was a great place for us
to be from a design to interview because our partner
in this Fender really knew what they wanted.
(guitar music)