The sE DM3 Direct Input Saves the Day

The sE DM3 Direct Input Saves the Day

I’m usually stressed beyond belief by the end of summer each year. Audio mastering gets busy in mid-February, and generally stays that way until the end of November. And then, the holidays. Every September, I give myself a break. I toss my acoustic guitar on my back, and aimlessly head across one ocean or another to see what I find.

It seems that if you’re ready and willing, people want to hear you play. So, this year, I performed a bunch of little unplugged shows in Greece. Lucky for me, it created demand for a larger show.

What does any of this have to do with sE Electronics?! I keep a DM3 Direct Input in my acoustic guitar case at all times. It takes up zero real estate, and it’s there when I need it. And on this trip, it truly saved the day!

The show was near Agrinio. We used a nightclub as the venue. Naturally, they didn’t have any sort of mixer for acoustic instruments, just a DJ mixer. I scoped it out the night before. It only had one microphone channel, and I needed at least two. The owner said he could borrow a mixer from someone else. I arrived for the gig, it was a another DJ mixer, with one mic input. Thankfully, this one had phantom power!

The phantom power mixer and the DM3 became my guitar channel. It had a two-band EQ that allowed me to roll a bit of “thump” off the acoustic. I patched the RCA outs from that mixer into one of the line inputs of the other mixer. That mixer became my vocal channel. Regrettably, I hadn’t brought a vocal mic with me. I would’ve sounded far better with a V7, but they gave me an off-brand 58-style mic to use.

It was a hilarious solo soundcheck, as I tried to get all the gain staging right between the two mixers. And then trying to get the budget mic set so that I wasn’t overloading its capsule, or clipping the input channel. Quite a delicate dance. What blew my mind was how amazing the acoustic guitar sounded. The DM3 was clean and clear, projecting the character of both my guitar and my hands.

In the end, I played a 2.5-hour show. No reverb. No monitors. A 3-foot guitar cable kept me strapped tightly to the mixing setup. We had a blast! If I hadn’t brought my DM3, the acoustic guitar would’ve sounded like cardboard or simply not had enough gain to be properly amplified.

Don’t leave home without one!