814’s are what Taylor do best - Congratuations!
Congrats! A fine choice indeed!
Nice purchase BuddaDog. I’m sure you’ll be enjoying your Taylor guitar for a long time.
What’s the main difference between the THR5a and the THR10? Just reading the description it seems the 5a is designed more for Acoustics with pickups?
Is that the biggest difference?
I need a portable Amp and may get one of these. I have pickups in two of my acoustics. I also have a hollow body Gibson ES-390 that might sound better on an amp designed for Acoustic guitars.
I found a great review of the THR5a. Im very impressed with the mic simulations and the blending control. You can blend the under saddle pickup with the mic. Very, very cool.
I know what my tax return will be buying. LOL
From what you just said I’m not certain you know that eh 5A takes the line output from your acoustic and uses it’s modeling to create a mic simulation. The blending is between your original signal and the modeled mic. It’s great for giving a guitar tone some added body.
It makes my OX sound like a well aged guitar and he 814 sound like angels are involved.
I highly recommend it for your practice room and your electric-acoustic. You could plug in an electric to the 5a but the 10 is better. Basically the 10 is electric rich with some acoustic modelling and the 5a is acoustic rich with some electric.
Crap. Now I want one. Anyone wanna trade for Yorkville AM-50? 
I’d been looking for a good acoustic guitar amp for awhile. I primarily play acoustic and wanted to enrich that tone. My local guitar shop installs a really nice under the saddle piezo pickup for under a $100. I’ve had it installed in two of my acoustics. My Larrivee D-09 came with a LR Baggs pickup.
I’ve been using my Fender Blues jr. for my electric guitar and these acoustics.
I’m looking forward to hearing the difference playing through a amp designed for acoustics.
The 5a will be perfect for practice and for the church specials that I occasionally perform. I have been playing without an amplifier in church. That works OK playing during services. But I need a bit more volume playing specials.
So I bought myself a new recording interface for Xmas. My old one was an original MBox by Digidesign. Great little interface but it was running on an XP machine and I was getting really paranoid that the computer would up and die on me.
So I bought a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20. It has 8 mic/line inputs (yay, I can do a full drum set) and came with Pro Tools first.
I upgraded to the full version of Pro Tools, which I am a little unhappy about. You can buy Pro Tools for ~$600 or sign up for a monthly plan for 25 bucks a month. I hate the idea of a monthly charge but with the subscription you get a ton of plugins and any upgrades that come along. If you buy it, you get 1 year of updates. I have had one major update already.
The software seems a bit buggy, there is one problem that is annoying as hell in that if you minimize the Pro Tools app, you have to go to task manager, highlight the app and click switch to to bring it back. However the recording seems to be cool so far. The included plugins are pretty nice but I lost a lot of my plugins with the upgrade. The main one I am bummed about is Sample Tank. I am going to have to shell out some cash for it. It is a great product.
I bought myself Steven Slate Drums. These are bad ass. I got the EX and will probably end up buying some more.
Sim amps suck. Bad. With 15 month old twins, making a lot of noise isn’t really an option. I tried the Eleven plugin included with Pro Tools. It sounds like shit. I tried AmpLion, it sounds like shit. I tried a limited version of Amplitube and it sounds a little better than shit, but not much. I got another amp sim last night, I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet and hold out the hope that it won’t sound like shit. (Note, this is for high gain stuff, the cleans aren’t too bad).
On the bright side, the mic’ed tones from my amp are awesome. I haven’t play with mic’ing on the acoustic yet but so far the interface is awesome.
I am working on a cover presently. When I get it done I’ll post a link.
Now I just need the time to actually record something.
Slee
If all that you need is a “bit more” it may do you just fine. I took mine to an open mike night and, since I was running it on batteries for convenience, I set the sound level out of the 5a at about guitar sound hole volume and positioned the venue’s guitar mike on the 5a speakers. That gave me the tone shape I wanted.
Unfortunately, the 5a has neither a low level nor a high level output jack. You could probably rig something off of it’s headphone jack and create a cheat for a “line out”. I hadn’t done that.
In any case, it will amplify significantly louder than your guitar’s sound hole.
sleestak
I have a smaller feature Focusrite as an interface.
I had some problems with it and Reaper. I usually had to mess with it for a while to get it to properly interface. It may have been a bug in the focusrite software, my crappy computer, or Reaper but most likely it was my inability through impatience to set it up properly.
Once I got it working I discovered that the latency somewhere in the chain made adding additional tracks, punching etc impossible.
Apparently my learning curve was a little too steep as I abandoned the whole mess and bought a Zoom 4hn. Not as versatile as your set by far but since I lack your patience it saved my sanity.
I’m looking forward to your recording. It might just inspire me to try to fix my computer recording issues.
The setup wasn’t terribly hard. There are basically three pieces. One, the interface registers as an audio device in Windows (assuming you are running Windows, I don’t know about Macs as I haven’t kept up with them). Once it is in there, Reaper will have some sort of setting to choose the interface. There is also a little Focusrite piece that allows you to select the sample rate. I haven’t used Reaper so I don’t know much about it.
The latency will depend on your processor and ram for the most part. I have an I7 laptop with 8 gigs of ram if I remember correctly and it runs fine so far though I haven’t added a lot of tracks yet. I do know that the latency is pretty damned low on my setup as I can play using an amp plugin and, while there is a bit of delay, it is low enough that I can play on time without the delay screwing me up. On my old setup that wasn’t possible, the delay would jack up my timing.
I played with the other amp sim I got. It is Positive Grid Bias FX. I played around with it a bit, it is the free version I got through Focusrite and so far it seems pretty good. What I am quite excited about is an amp matching software package they have. Supposedly it allows you to take a patch, compare it an audio sample of your amp then it tweaks the output of the patch to match. (warning, videos) Linky. Linky 2.
Slee
Anyone here looked at Ohm Studio? A friend showed me this DAW. Looks interesting but also a very time consuming project.
I might consider a private project someday. But I can’t imagine ever getting invited to work on someone else’s. My last name isn’t Clapton or McCartney. LOL
I’ll try a mic with this amp. The amp’s small speakers should work really well.
It came in today. I ordered the gig bag too. There’s room for the cables and power supply.
I’m quite impressed that so much sound is coming from such a small box.
Wow, at our show tonight, I broke an E string on the bass. I’ve been playing bass for 32 years, this is the first time I’ve broken an E string, and I’m the kind of person who doesn’t change strings till they break. This particular E string was 30 years old. I always bring a backup bass to shows, but this is the first time I’ve needed it, and it was good to have on hand.
Yanking the string the rest of the way off mid-song so it would stop muting the others bloodied up my hand, so it was good theatrics. ROCK AND ROLLLLLLL!
It the guitarist’s bass, so after the show I told him, “You need a new bass, this one has a broken string.”
The fact that you could move through it and keep the gig going, theatrically, AND had a backup bass (in my experience that is very uncommon) all explain why you can discuss it in a calm way. Impressive. Hope your hand is on the mend. String cuts hurt.
Ugh - I hate it when that happens. Now you have a good 12-15 years before the brightness of the new string wears off. 
Oh yeah, I bring spares of everything besides a cabinet and a tuner. Extra amp, fuzz pedals, bass, cables, batteries, and now even power cords. If the cab dies, I’ll go direct. If the tuner dies, I can tune by ear. Every spare has come in handy now.
Thanks for the thoughts on the hand. It didn’t hurt when it happened. I knew about it because my hand felt wet. By the time I got my stuff off the stage, I was feeling all 4 cuts. Especially the two on the inside of my knuckles. Neosporin +pain relief is my friend this morning.
I kind of really do have that problem. I love that particular Precision, but it may be just because of the super dead strings. I’ll know when I re-string it this evening. If I don’t like them, maybe I can bury the new set in the yard for a week…or something. I’m off to Google “aging guitar strings” now.
So, the internet is filled with theories of how to deaden your strings quickly. There were two I found that were backed by heroes of mine that seemed slightly less gross than smearing bacon fat on the strings. Danny Gratton apparently would coat his with a mix of cigarette ash and beer, claiming the acid mixture would corrode them quickly and evenly. Steve Cropper reportedly recommends Chapstick.
Since it’s not my bass, I opted for the Chapstick. My wife (a Chapstick addict) had a stick of wintergreen that she hated, so I saved the 75 cents or so. I was a little skeptical, because I’d never heard that lubricated strings were less bright than regular ones. In fact, I think I’ve heard the opposite; that they retain their brightness longer.
Mr. Cropper, you’ve always seemed wise, and I’m sorry for doubting you if you did indeed recommend this. In less than 10 minutes of wiping wintergreen waxiness on them, they sounded at least a few months old. I wish I had made a before/after recording. Since I can kind of change strings at will now, I just might.
Aceplace, it’s been a while I hope that you are enjoying the 5A.
Anybody here ever work live with a loop pedal? I saw a guy using one with an electric acoustic guitar and really liked the way he could use it to build a rhythm and then add lead on top of it.
I checked out some discussions on the acoustic guitar forums and it looks like the Jamman pedals are a good place to start. I have a Ditto but it’s one button and small size are a bother. The thing sinks into my carpet so I practically have to stomp it to get it to work. That along with only getting flashing light feedback on what mode it’s in is no fun.
It will probably take a lot of practice to get the timing right but I’m excited about some of the possibilities.
Hey, if anybody is interested in some collectible guitars, this local Portland guy is selling all of his on Craigslist. Includes some real vintage stuff. I’m not at all familiar with this market, but if you see something that looks like a killer deal, let me know and perhaps I’ll check it out.