Tone – 16
Go West, young man, and the horse I rode.
To understand why the Trace Acoustic was so successful (and why that success is unlikely to be replicated) it helps to understand the times.
In the eighties we working musicians still tended to use backline for everything, including plugged-in acoustics, and those backline amps had evolved alongside the magnetic pickup electric. The latter gets a large part of its character from an amplifier which suffers from no requirement for particular sonic accuracy but is required to keep going all night at quite high volume levels and distortion is allowed – indeed, encouraged. The first requirement laid on it therefore is reliable high volume signal handling. Characteristic tones started out as a happy accidents which later engineers then copied, and there’s plenty of money in the distortion part – indeed bucket loads of cash in the pedals market.
There was diminished high frequency capacity over 5kHz and no particular need for much below 100Hz, and in some cases, 200Hz. Everything juicy in an electric guitar happens in the mids, so if there’s an eq curve between 200Hz and 4kHz that is knobbly enough for rock’n’roll, everyone is happy.
