The Collings Forum

Anyone else using a Venue preamp for their Collings? Any tips on dialing in your tone for what sounds closest to your actual guitar?

I have a D1 that I had a K&K mini installed on the wisdom of other Collings owners. I also picked up a Red Eye pedal for the same reason. I like what it did to my overall tone that my other preamp (FA-1 one style clone) did not do. However, even thought it helped my over all tone it was destroying the mix. After some interaction with the engineer at Fire Eye it turns out that the Red Eye send a hot signal in order to over come issues such as cable noise. Our sound folks at church don't know enough to fix my acoustic signal being super hot and I have one channel for either electric or acoustic. I decide on a weekly basis which fits the best on a given week. I believe the Venue will let me get the signal more in line with what my electric board is sending to the mixing board.

Since you like the sound of the K&K and Red-Eye combo, but the output level is too hot for your church's PA, why not just insert a 10- or 20-dB pad between the Red-Eye and the board to reduce the level? Only a few bucks, no effect on sound quality, and you get to keep your existing preamp. Several outfits make these; here’s a link to one that's available from B&H in NYC. The Baggs Venue is a nice preamp, but so is the Red-Eye, in my opinion (it's what I use).

Hope this helps,

John