A pickup and a microphone hear two different instruments. The pickup sits under the saddle, in the soundhole or inside the body, and hears the strings through the bridge: the attack, the pitch, not much else. A microphone a foot in front of the guitar hears the whole thing: the top and back moving, the air inside the body, the room around it. That is why a DI acoustic track sounds thin and quacky next to a recording, even when the player and the guitar are the same.
Plugging into a DI is still the practical choice. There is no bleed, no room to tune, no microphone to place, and a live player can move. The question is how to put back what the pickup left out. This post walks through the mechanism using the controls of Woody, a DI acoustic guitar enhancer that takes a pickup signal in and gives back the guitar as a pair of studio microphones would hear it.
What the pickup leaves out, and what a body voicing puts back
The missing part is resonance. A guitar body is a set of coupled resonators: the top, the back, the air cavity, the sides. Pluck a string and each of them rings at its own frequencies and for its own length of time, and a microphone hears the sum. A pickup hears the string vibration before most of that happens.
Woody's answer is a BODY control with sixteen voicings. Each one is a guitar body heard by two microphones, one at the neck and one at the body, spread left and right, with every resonance ringing for as long as it should. The sixteen are grouped by instrument: four Studio, eight Dreadnought and four Jumbo. Load the plugin on a DI track and it opens on Dreadnought 1 with every control at rest, which the product page describes as already right. The voicing is doing the work before anything is turned.
The track is mono in and stereo out, so the two microphones in the voicing give the part a width a single pickup never has. The support article recommends a mono track in a mono-in, stereo-out slot; a stereo input is summed to mono first.
Choosing a voicing is the one decision that matters most, and the quickstart tip for it is worth taking literally: loop four bars and step through all sixteen with the band playing. Woody crossfades between voicings without a click, so this can be done while the track runs. The voicing that sounds smallest on its own often sits best in the arrangement. A big-bodied Jumbo heard alone is impressive; under a bass and a vocal it is usually in the way.
WOOD then sets how much that body sings. Toward TIGHT the resonances settle into a controlled, even response. Toward DEEP they stand out and ring longer for a bigger, woodier guitar. The product page's demo of a dreadnought pickup getting its body back uses WOOD to keep the boom in check, which is the trade-off in one knob: more body means more low-mid resonance, and a dreadnought has plenty of it.
The air around the guitar, and the pickup blended back in
A microphone does not hear the body in a vacuum. SPACE adds the air around the instrument: a short, diffuse tail either side. The product page is careful to say it is not a reverb; it is the room a microphone hears, the first few reflections that tell the ear the guitar is in a space. A DI track with no SPACE sounds like it is pressed against the listener's face, which is accurate, because the pickup is pressed against the strings.
The other half of a convincing DI sound is not throwing the pickup away. The pickup's directness, the attack straight from the bridge, is what lets an acoustic part cut through a mix, and a fully miked sound can lose it. MIX blends the pickup's own signal back in, time-aligned, so the attack lands on the same sample as the body. The quickstart's full-band setting is MIX back to about 80 percent with a Studio voicing and WOOD toward TIGHT, so the pick cuts through. For guitar and voice, the advice runs the other way: a Dreadnought or Jumbo, WOOD a little past centre and some SPACE, filling the room a band would otherwise fill.
Pickups themselves are not consistent. An under-saddle piezo arrives bright and thin, a soundhole magnetic mid-heavy, an internal mic boxy. With PICKUP on, Woody listens for a few seconds and brings any of them to the shape the body was built on, so the sixteen voicings sound the same whatever the guitar is wearing. With it off, the pickup is left as it is.
Three further controls shape the performance rather than the instrument. LIFE sets how hard the playing pushes forward; the quickstart pairs LIFE toward PUSH with a little GLUE on strummed parts, so the part drives without jumping out on the accents. AIR adds a broad, silky lift on the top, where a microphone hears the fingers and the string noise a pickup misses. GLUE levels a performance into place over phrases. Behind all of it, a gentle, oversampled input stage gives the playing the bloom and push of a good recording chain, which is why INPUT is set first: play the loudest part and turn INPUT until the IN meter peaks in the amber, between -12 and -3 dBFS. Presets never change INPUT or POWER, so set it once per track.
Because the latency is four samples, reported to the host, Woody works while tracking as well as mixing. The player hears a miked guitar in the headphones instead of a pickup, which changes how they play: dynamics and touch come back when the sound rewards them.
To hear it, start a 14-day free trial of the full version, put Woody on a mono DI track, set INPUT to the amber, and loop four bars of the song. Step through all sixteen BODY voicings with the rest of the arrangement playing, pick the one that sits rather than the one that impresses, then move WOOD toward TIGHT or DEEP depending on how much room the low mids have. Add SPACE until the guitar is in a room, and bring MIX back toward 80 percent if the attack has gone soft. The 12 factory presets, from Tight and Deep to Open Room and Record, are good places to start the same tour.