Hybrid Guitars In Worship

Most of my worship playing is with our youth group band. I have been working with senior high students for nearly a decade at my church. I’ve had the privilege of playing with some great guitar players over the years. Over the past year, my other guitarists have graduated and moved on and I’ve become the solo guitarist for the band. I’m comfortable just playing acoustic solo, but I like to have the tone of the electric guitar for some songs. When doing an up-tempo song, it’s nice to have a little kick to the sound. But, I also wanted to fill out the sound of our band a little as well. This started my quest for a hybrid guitar. These come in many shapes and configurations, but the basic idea is this: combining acoustic and electric tones in a single instrument. For years, Boss has produced the Acoustic Simulator pedal to imitate the tone of an acoustic. This may get you near the ballpark, but is still pretty limited. The hybrid takes it a step further by having acoustic and electric pickups in the same body.  I tried out several guitars in the hybrid camp when I was looking. There are several guitars that have come out recently in this niche, Michael Kelly Hybrid, Ovation VXT, Carvin AE185, Parkwood Hybrid, Taylor T5, Anderson Crowdster Plus, and the Epiphone Les Paul Ultra II among others. I myself picked up a Peavey Generation EXP, which is a Nashville Telecaster-style guitar with a Graftech piezo in the bridge. It has a 5-way pickup switch, volume and tone control for the electric and volume control for the acoustic, along with a 3-way switch to choose electric, electric/acoustic, or acoustic pickups. It has a stereo output jack, which allows me to plug in my custom Lava Cable Y-cable and run the acoustic and electric signals separately. I’ve found this to be a generally useful solution in my band situation. It lets me play two tones at once, which fills in the sound a little bit. It also cuts down on the gear I need to bring each week, which is a bonus. It lets me have more freedom to change the sound of the song in the middle without changing guitars, which would be impossible. I can play acoustic on the verse and then kick in the electric for the chorus to give it some more emphasis. To have even more control, you can run an A/B/Y box to let you use a pedal to switch the tones or you could use a stereo pan pedal to do the same thing. I have a tuner running through the electric side that allows me to mute my signal that I use in the same way. I figure I can have the acoustic pickup always on to double my sound. The one gripe I have is that the acoustic sound is somewhat bland. This is common in all of the hybrids I’ve tried out (I didn’t try all of them in the list above), because aside from the Crowdster Plus, they are electric guitar bodies doing acoustic sounds. There’s obviously going to be some compromise with hybrid guitars, they won’t replace your Les Paul or your D-28, but they are a useful tool. I’m looking forward to a new offering from Ibanez, the Montage (www.ibanez.com/acoustic/series.aspx?s=Montage) which is an acoustic body with the electric trimmings, along with built in chorus, reverb and distortion. It also allows you to have instant access to a clean or distorted electric signal. I definitely have my doubts about the quality of the overdrive, but I do like the concept of the acoustic-centered hybrid.  All in all, the hybrid offers some convenience and performance advantages at the cost of some tone. I generally look at the set that we’re going to be doing for worship that week and decide if I absolutely need an acoustic or if I can get by with the hybrid. This is where I hope the Montage will make that decision much easier.