Joe Pass Virtuoso album thru an amp sim?

**Christian Miller** · 03-28-2025, 10:35 AM

Originally Posted by grahambop

Here's another acoustic recording of the Gibson 175 I did more recently, using a better mic (I was testing a Rode NT4 mic which I had just bought). This was played with a pick, which seemed to give a clearer/more projected sound than the fingerstyle recording. Anyway I was quite surprised how good this sounded, you could probably record a whole album like this and get away with it!

Laminate boxes mic well! Many a cheap acoustic guitar has sounded golden on record for this reason.

**AKA** · 03-28-2025, 11:21 PM

And this is why I don’t post clips of my playing.

Originally Posted by grahambop

Here's another acoustic recording of the Gibson 175 I did more recently, using a better mic (I was testing a Rode NT4 mic which I had just bought). This was played with a pick, which seemed to give a clearer/more projected sound than the fingerstyle recording. Anyway I was quite surprised how good this sounded, you could probably record a whole album like this and get away with it!

**Al Haig** · 03-29-2025, 06:07 AM

Originally Posted by grahambop

Here's another acoustic recording of the Gibson 175 I did more recently, using a better mic (I was testing a Rode NT4 mic which I had just bought). This was played with a pick, which seemed to give a clearer/more projected sound than the fingerstyle recording. Anyway I was quite surprised how good this sounded, you could probably record a whole album like this and get away with it!

**Doctor Jeff** · 03-30-2025, 12:21 PM

Originally Posted by lawson-stone

So much for the claim that an ES175 doesn't sound good acoustically. I love what you got from it there.

Yep I agree—great sound.

That said, there are quite a few other guitars with more projection acoustically that could have been used by Joe if Norman Granz and David Palmer wanted to record purely with a mic.

It might have been that they tried recording Joe’s 175 acoustically as an experiment and liked the results.

I mean, heck, if I had recorded that track above (or any of Joe’s tracks), I’d be keeping it for sure.

**grahambop** · 03-30-2025, 02:59 PM

What is really annoying is that I sat and had a long conversation with Joe Pass once in the bar at Ronnie Scotts, sometime in the early 1980s. So I could have asked him about the whole Virtuoso thing.

Unfortunately at that time I hadn’t actually heard Virtuoso (I’d only heard ‘Catch Me’ and ‘For Django’), so I wasn’t even aware of any of this.

In hindsight, what a wasted opportunity to find out all about it!