PG's John Bohlinger has a bash with the mod scientist's new 4-knob squeeze box.
The Hummingbird Studio EC features a mahogany body and sides with a Sitka spruce top, a Round SlimTaper profile mahogany neck, and L.R. Baggs electronics.
The Hummingbird has become more versatile and expressive than ever with the introduction of the Hummingbird Studio EC, Hummingbird Standard EC, and the Hummingbird Rosewood EC. Equipped with cutaway bodies that provide improved access to the upper frets of the Round SlimTaper profile mahogany necks, L.R. Baggs electronics, and shipped in hardshell cases, they’re ready for you to take them wherever the muse carries you.
Hummingbird Standard EC
- Mahogany body and sides with a Sitka spruce top
- Mahogany neck with a Round SlimTaper profile and 12” radius
- L.R. Baggs VTC electronics
- Gloss finish with full-color Hummingbird graphics on the pickguard
Hummingbird Standard Rosewood EC
- Rosewood body and sides with a Sitka spruce top gives more bass and harmonic complexity
- Mahogany neck with a Round SlimTaper profile and 12” radius
- L.R. Baggs VTC electronics
- Gloss finish with full-color Hummingbird graphics on the pickguard
Hummingbird Studio EC
- Mahogany body and sides with a Sitka spruce top
- Utile neck with a Round SlimTaper profile and 16” radius
- L.R. Baggs Element Bronze electronics
- Satin finish with one-color Hummingbird graphics on the pickguard
A forward-thinking, inventive, high-quality electro-acoustic design yields balance, playability, and performance flexibility.
High-quality construction. Flexible, responsive, and detailed-sounding pickup/mic system. Lots of bass resonance without feedback or mud.
Handsome, understated design may still estrange traditionalists.
$1,599
L.R. Baggs AEG-1
lrbaggs.com
Though acoustic amplification has improved by leaps, bounds, and light years, the challenges of making a flattop loud remain … challenging. L.R. Baggs has played no small part in improving the state of acoustic amplification, primarily via ultra-reliable pickups like the Anthem, Lyric, andHiFi Duet microphone and microphone/under-saddle systems, the overachieving, inexpensive Element Active System, and theM1 andM80 magnetic soundhole pickups—all of which have become industry standards to one degree or another.
Lloyd Baggs got his start building guitars for the likes of Jackson Brown, Ry Cooder, Janis Ian, and Graham Nash. So he can tell you that building a good guitar from the ground up is no mean feat. Enter the AEG-1, L.R. Baggs’ first flattop—a unique thin-hollowbody design that leverages the company’s copious experience with transducers of every kind to create a successful, holistically functional instrument. In some ways, it feels like an instrument built to match a great pickup system—a cool way to consider guitar design if you think about it.
Gentle Deconstruction
Admittedly, I’m a flattop design traditionalist—that jerk that thinks any acoustic sketched out after 1962 looks a bit yucky. So, the AEG-1’s looks were a bit jarring out of the case. That didn’t last. Though it’s very shallow and soft curves sometimes evoked a swimming pool outline, that of a nice Scandinavian coffee table, and Gibson’s L6-S (these are highly positive associations in my opinion), the lovely body contours and shallow cutaway have a slimming effect and give the guitar a sense of forward lean at the aft end—almost like a sprinkle of Fender Jaguar. The more you stare at it, the more it looks like a very artful deconstruction of a dreadnought shape, and a very natural one at that.
The construction itself is unique, too. The sides are CDC-machined poplar ply, oriented so you see the laminate in cross-section. The top is a very pretty torrefied Sitka spruce, which is braced in a traditional scalloped X pattern. The sides are also braced with arms that radiate toward the waist and heel at 120 degrees from each other, reinforcing the soundhole and the substantial neck heel. The back is critical to the AEG-1’s tone makeup, too. Rather than a merely ornamental bit of plywood, it’s a lovely Indian rosewood that vibrates freely, enhancing resonance and the many organic facets of the AEG-1’s tone spectrum.
The 25.625"-scale mahogany neck is mated to the body by way of four substantial bolts and an equally substantial contoured heel and heel block. Sturdy, perhaps, undersells the secure feel of the neck/body union. In hand, the slim-C neck is lovely, too. The bound rosewood fretboard is beautiful, and the playability is fantastic as well. The action is snappy and fast, the 1.7" nut width is comfy and spacious. And, in general, the build quality of the Korea-made AEG-1 is excellent.
Resonant With Room To Roam
With the exception of country blues players—and guitarists like Blake Mills andMadison Cunningham, who dabble in rubber bridges to prioritize focus over breadth—most 6-stringers want a lot of resonance from their instruments. The AEG-1 resonates beautifully, particularly for a thin-bodied guitar. And the HiFi Duet, made up of the HiFi bridge plate pickup and the company’s Silo microphone, is deep and detailed, so the output is easily reshaped by the flexible volume, tone, and mic/pickup blend controls. But the balance of the constituent parts, and the deft way with which the design sacrifices a little body resonance for string detail, is smart and satisfying to interact with.
This is especially true when you use blend settings that favor the microphone. If you get the tone control on the AEG-1, and your amp, dialed in right (I used a mid-scoop and slight bump in the treble and bass from a Taylor Circa74), the extra bass resonance is warm but without being overbearing, adding mass to tones without slathering them in mud. But you don’t have to get too precious and precise about such settings to make the guitar sound great. Working together, the HiFi Duet’s pickup/mic blend and tone controls provide the range and variation to shift bass emphasis or put sparkle to the fore. This range is helped in no small part by the guitar’s basic feedback resistance. I spent a fair bit of this evaluation playing loud, plugged into the Circa74, which was tilted toward my head at a 30-degree angle. Only when I bent down to turn the amp off, situating the guitar about a foot-and-a-half from the speaker, did the AEG-1 start to feed back.
The Verdict
Inventive, attractive in form and function, playable, and above all forgiving, full-sounding, and balanced when amplified, the AEG-1 is an unexpected treat. The HiFi Duet pickup-and-microphone system is a star. But rather than feeling like an afterthought, it feels like an integral part of the whole. And it’s the cohesiveness of this design—and the wholeness of the many sounds it creates—that makes the AEG-1 different from many stage-oriented electro-acoustic guitars
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A more compact Cortex puts a universe of sounds and tone creation potential at your feet, at a price that’s a fraction of bigger floor modelers.
Fast, easy capture process. Easy to navigate top-level functions. Captures can sound very accurate. Extensive online community creates a trove of downloadable models.
No onboard screen means you rely on a smartphone or tablet for deep navigation. Getting closest possible amp captures via miking can take a lot of trial and error.
$549
Neural DSP Nano Cortex
neuraldsp.com
The complexities and capabilities of modelers like Neural DSP’s Cortex series demand certain tradeoffs. For starters, a powerful modeler can’t be the size of a postage stamp, at least if you intend to adjust many parameters and source numerous presets in real time on a stage. Neural’s newNano Cortex pushes back at the boundaries of that compromise. It's not much wider than two MXR pedals side by side. The $549 price tag, which is just about a third of the price of the Nano’s more capable big brother,the Quad Cortex, makes it an appealing proposition too.
Taken at Face Value
The Nano Cortex is a streamlined piece of hardware. An array of five push buttons enables signal capture and navigation of banks and effects. Two rotary bypass footswitches also move through presets and effects blocks, and six knobs (with LED surrounds that display levels) govern gain, output level, EQ, and wet/dry effects blend. The big omission here is, of course, a screen that displays signal effects chains and preset names. That job, if you choose to use the Nano in that fashion, falls to the Cortex Cloud app and a smartphone or tablet, meaning you’ll need two pieces of hardware on hand to make the most of the Nano’s potential. You can use the Nano in performance without a phone or tablet. But you’ll need to have a photographic memory of what presets are made up of what amps and effects, which gets extra tricky if you use wildly divergent sounds designed to work at vastly different output levels.
Many sounds from the Nano Cortex are fantastic. Many of the factory presets—particularly those dressed up with a little gain, will probably fool listeners in a blind test when those sounds are situated in a mix, and can be fairly classified as authentic in most cases. Like any modeler, the accuracy of modeled tones doesn’t mean that dynamic interactions with those same models will feel the same way, especially if you use feedback and the overtones and harmonics generated via amp proximity in your expression. For guitarists that don’t integrate these methods into their playing, the Nano’s sounds will be more than satisfactory stand-ins for their analog equivalents.
A Captive Audience
Modelers love the convenience of capture technology—the ability to clone the characteristics of many amps and pedals in your collection, which you can then take on the road, to a gig, or practice in a compact floor unit. It’s a very appealing and practical idea, particularly if you’re playing anywhere where parking in front of the venue isn’t a given. Neural’s capture method is fast and easy. To capture an amp’s personality, you mike an amp (or send the signal via a load box) to the Nano Cortex, run a signal from the Nano to your amp, press capture, listen for the test signals and kick back for five minutes while the unit does its thing. The process is fundamentally easy. And it enables you to stuff an approximation of your favorite amp, or 10, in the pocket of a gig bag. It’s also what makes the tone library crowd sourced by the constantly growing and dedicated Cortex artist and user community so extensive.
“Nano Cortex’s capture process is fundamentally easy. And it enables you to stuff an approximation of your favorite amp, or ten, in the pocket of a gig bag.”
But while you can conceivably nail the sound of your amp, or pedal, to the letter in five minutes, achieving the best possible approximation can take many tries—particularly if you use the amp-miking method. Though I got close, I never quite hit the bullseye in my attempts. The same mic placement, amp settings, and audio interface all sounded more expansive and livelier when tracked live than via a capture. Would I love to have close-but-not-quite approximations of my favorite three different amps on a fly date? You bet—especially if I could situate a few key, favorite pedals on a small pedalboard with the Nano.
The Verdict
Though there is no shortage of serviceable sounds built into the Nano Cortex, the real action will, for many, be the abundance of captures and sounds created via the larger Cortex community. This is no bad thing—especially if you have the time to cruise and create these sounds at leisure. There’s no reason that any of these sounds can’t become solid foundations for core live tones. But time spent exploring an extensive online library of captures or creating them is time not spent creating songs. So, for many players, Nano Cortex will be a better bet for home recording than for performance or in a deadline-driven studio situation. This is made doubly true for the lack of the onboard editing interface and the Nano Cortex reliance on a smartphone or tablet for deeper editing. Adding a second piece of gear compounds the risks inherent in an already complex technology.
Still, the number of available presets is considerable, and players with gigs that require spanning multiple styles in a night will have so much to work with here if they manage without a screen and trust their phone. In terms of achieving sheer processing power in a small size, the Nano Cortex is tough to beat. And for those that savor the experience of creating and sourcing a huge library of sounds in a unit with the footprint of a sandwich, thrills and big-time dividends await.