Shout out to this amazing resource and all of the power users out there volunteering their incredible wealth of expertise and knowledge! Bit of a long-winded post here, trying to provide sufficient background without making you read my life story, and hopefully others will find it useful.
Current gear in my possession includes a clip-on condenser mic (it's either an ATM350 or a PRO 35 I'm actually not sure), mando with soon-to-be-installed K&K Twin Internal piezo transducer, and an LR Baggs Venue DI.
I've had acceptable results using the K&K+Venue setup with past mandolins. However, my new mando has somewhat unconventional tone bar placement on the bass side, preventing the piezo sensor from being set in the ideal recommended spot underneath the foot of the bridge... you have to travel up 1-2 inches before you get enough real estate in between the tone bar and the f-hole to affix the sensor without it visibly sticking out into the f-hole. This initially seemed sketchy to me and my local tech so we didn't install and I opted for the mic clipped on to my pickguard direct to the board, which hey sounds really great (surprise surprise). However, I'm about fed up because I CANNOT get the gooseneck to keep the mic from dropping directly into the f-hole over the course of my set, where it then feeds back and sounds objectively horrible, and it forces me to constantly be messing with it. Bummer! Anyone have a fix for that one??
After swearing I wouldn't suffer through another gig like that, I called up K&K who assure me the pickup system should work just fine with the bass-side sensor placed a little higher (I guess we'll see). So now I'll also have a direct in and additional options. Which got me thinking, assuming I can get the mic to behave, why not look at blending both?
From what I can tell there are the following:
Schertler Yellow Blender (expensive!)
Fire-Eye Red-Eye Twin (but won't support the mic, only has 1/4 inputs?)
Headway EDB-2 (looks good)
Tonebone PZ PRE (looks great!!)
To have my cake and eat it too, it looks like the Tonebone would allow me to mute both signals simultaneously for tuning, and also assign the boost to JUST the transducer signal during solos so I'm not also boosting the condenser (boosting the condenser seems like a bad idea)?
Thanks for any recs and advice on the gear situation, and would also love to hear opinions from any FOH sound guys out there.... Do other players actually do this? Would you prefer to receive the two inputs separately at the board and mix them in the house yourselves, or is it preferable to just send the one blended signal? Is this idea overkill and I should just use one or the other and be less of a pain in the ass?
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