Acoustic guitar amplification can be a minefield, but D-TAR’s digital pre-amp looks to provide the user with 16 different guitar sounds in one unit...

Some of our more eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that a company by the name of D-TAR have on occasion sponsored the ‘Acoustic Notes’ section in Acoustic. The company itself draws upon the extensive knowledge and experience of both Seymour Duncan and Rick Turner, hence the name D(uncan) T(urner) A(coustic) R(esearch). Duncan and Turner both enjoy enviable reputations within the musical instrument industry. Seymour Duncan has, for the past 30 years or more, designed and built pickups, while Rick Turner – a co-founder of bass manufacturer Alembic, and subsequent head of R&D at Gibson – has manufactured pickups and piezos for more than 35 years. An impressive pedigree, then, from which to launch the Mama Bear.
   
This curiously named unit is a digital acoustic guitar preamp. The name itself stems from the R&D stage of its production. The concept was given what amounts to a code name – ‘Mama Bear’ – and the name stuck. The blurb that accompanies the unit claims that the Mama Bear “neutralises the pickup of your own guitar and then restores the natural body resonance”. A bold claim indeed, for if it be true, the most basic, budget model could, in effect, be transformed into a high-end beauty – at least in terms of its amplified tone, that is.
   
Compared to a rack mounted unit, the Mama Bear unit is small and compact, and weighs in at just over a kilo. The metal housing appears sturdy and overall the unit seems well built. Don’t tell D-TAR, but I stood on the review model, and it comfortably took my weight (13 stone on a good day), which leads me to believe that the Mama Bear is strong enough to handle pretty much anything that may happen to it on its way to and from a gig or the studio.
   
The layout is very simple – even for the most hardened of technophobes. A single input on the face of the unit is matched with two outputs on the rear panel – one, for a standard ¼” jack and the other a balanced XLR. The adjacent Input Level allows for the variation in pickup and piezo outputs. To get the most from the Mama Bear, it is best to set the Input Level so that at full strum, the overload light flickers momentarily. The Blend control allows the user to control how much the Mama Bear is affecting the output. Sweeping the control to the Wet setting relates to total effect, the opposite sweep to Dry is the same as a bypass. The Bypass, Mute and Phase toggle buttons are welcome features. The true Bypass does exactly that and leaves the signal from your own guitar untouched. The Mute button is obviously useful if you’re having to tune during a gig, while the Phase button reverses the phase of the signal. This can be particularly useful if, for example, you were using the unit onstage and the resonance of the soundboard was in phase with an onstage monitor or amp, you could engage the Phase button and nullify the feedback. The Output Level does exactly what you’d want/expect it to do.
   
Now to the ‘brains’ of the Mama Bear. The 16-position Input Source control is where the neutralising of your guitar’s tone takes place. Looking at the accompanying table, you can see that each setting is a different type of pickup, whether it be a piezo, under-saddle transducers or soundhole pickup. The idea here is that you match the setting to the actual type of pickup fitted to the guitar. It has to be said that a degree of experimentation achieves best results. The Target Instrument control allows you to select which type of tone the Mama Bear will output. If the Blend control is set to Wet, this selected output will be in place of the original tone of your guitar. A wide variety of ‘target’ tones are on offer, ranging from parlours, dreadnoughts, grand auditoriums, jumbos and even resonators.
   
Completing the features is a simple Power on/off push button and an Analogue Lo-Cut Filter. This particular feature is designed to be an option if too much bottom end is present in the output tone, as it cuts the low frequencies.
   
So that’s the tin, but does it do what it says it does? Unfortunately, the answer is not a simple yes or no, or perhaps I should say that the answer is yes and no. When I first began testing the Mama Bear, I was playing an Ibanez (Artwood series) through a Marshall AS50R. The results overall were disappointing. Although I had the Mama Bear matched to the correct pickup for my guitar, there were at best only three or four Target Instrument options that seemed to make any impact on the tone (just out of interest, they were Options 6, 12 and 15 – these being boutique fingerstyle, super jumbo and resonator tones respectively). I battled for some time, until coming to the conclusion that perhaps I was missing something. I had heard good things about these preamps, but couldn’t really get much out of my review sample. I spoke with Aria UK who distribute D-TAR here in the UK who gave me some very useful pointers. It would appear that the Marshall amp was to blame.
   
To explain, one of the keys to getting the best out of the Mama Bear is ensuring that it is coupled to a quality PA system or an acoustic amp which understands the difference between sound production and sound reproduction. Essentially, the more transparent the amplification, the better.
   
Although the Marshall is a great little amp, it has a sound that is very much its own – this is great if you like that sound, but not so good for the purposes of our test. I therefore switched to the Schertler David amp that we reviewed in Issue 8. I particularly like this amp and so have been rather lax about returning it to its rightful owners, Access All Areas. The Schertler is one of the most transparent amps I’ve heard and so felt confident that it would help reveal the hidden depths of the Mama Bear – and so it proved to be. The delicate nuances of each setting became very apparent and I had a great deal of fun playing with each setting. My standard dreadnought became whatever I chose it to be. Of particular note was the excellent reproduction of a grand auditorium and with a glass slide upon my finger, and a flick of the switch, my dreadnought sounded exactly like a Tricone resonator. For the sake of comparison, I also tried the Mama Bear through our house PA system – the HK Audio Lucas XT system. Wow! It really was like having 16 different guitars in your hand at once.
   
So, going back to the question of whether the Mama Bear does what it claims to, you can see why the answer is not a straight yes or no. In many ways, the Mama Bear is a very clever bit of kit which will appeal to the sufficiently well heeled gigging acoustician or studio player, because of its portability, simplicity and excellent tone-shaping capabilities. Clearly though, to get the best out of it, you need to have some pretty decent (and consequently expensive) amplification. Without it, you could be left a little disappointed.