help me out

[flandaneran]

ok here's the thing. im gonna spill my guts. I love the dave matthews band. dave is the reason i started playing guitar and got myself an acoustic. I know a lot of his songs (i'd say well over half) and i play them pretty darn good. But after about 5 min of playing a dave song my little girl hands start to cramp and fall asleep and i cant play anything at all. So im thinking of switching my dave playing to electric so i can make the reach without cramping up. what pedals should i get? is the boss acoustic sim anygood? help me out here

[RunsWithBuffalo]

First thing you should do it take a half hour lesson to see if there is something you are doing wrong that is causing you pain, cause that shouldn't be happening.

Going to a normal electric probably won't help you stop the cramping. It has the same fret spacing that an acoustic does unless you go with a short scale guitar. What may be happening is the action of your acoustic is too high causing you to have to press very hard to get the strings to ring. This puts a lot of strain on your hand, it almost caused me to give up guitar completely.

The acoustic simulator sounds like ass. I am a boss guy all the way, but that pedal sounds like an ovation played through a flanger a la "every rose has its thorn."

Some of my favorites are: DD-3 (delay), BD-2 (Blues Driver), and for 39 bucks you can't go wrong with the DS-1 (Distortion)

But seriously, check your action first, it sounds like that's the problem.

[flandaneran]

thanks for the kind reply. What you are saying is true, its an action issue. However, i lowered my action and i got a crap sound out of my acoustic so i had to raise it again. No matter what you do electric is going to be lower action so i thought maybe that would be the ticket. but i guess what your saying is that pedal through an electric wont cut it for a dave sound so thanks for that insight

[RunsWithBuffalo]

thanks for the kind reply. What you are saying is true, its an action issue. However, i lowered my action and i got a crap sound out of my acoustic so i had to raise it again. No matter what you do electric is going to be lower action so i thought maybe that would be the ticket. but i guess what your saying is that pedal through an electric wont cut it for a dave sound so thanks for that insight

Smack your luthier or whoever lowered the action. It should not affect the sound much at all, unless you were trying to play the strings too hard.

To your other question, no electric will ever sound like an acoustic.

What kind of guitar do you have?

[flandaneran]

takmine. Ya the dude screwed up my guitar and charged me 60 bucks so i had to pay another guy 50 to get it back to the way it was. i think its an eg 330 cedar top.