What do I plug into?

Four main choices for electro-acoustics

Straight to front of house

You can send pretty much any signal straight to a decent desk/PA.There should be enough gain make-up in the desk to deal even with simple passive systems, though don’t expect sound engineers to care too much about dealing with the intricacies of something with which they’re not really familiar. You’ll also have no control over your EQ or monitoring.

Dedicated acoustic amp

Always a good idea if you’re serious about playing electros live. First, you can shape the tone exactly as you want it and send that via a DI straight to the sound engineer/PA. Second, you’re assured of reasonable on-stage monitoring. Third, you can sing through most of them for tiny gigs, too. We love the Laney A1+ and pretty much anything by AER.

Outboard preamp device

Units such as the LR Baggs DI range or Fishman Aura/ Platinum preamps offer a host of practical features including EQ, notch-filters, phasereversal, compression and reverb, depending on model. While they don’t give an audible monitor like an acoustic amp would, they nonetheless enable you to sculpt your sound before sending it front-of-house.

Full-range powered speaker

Any powered PA speaker (eg, Line 6 StageSource/Yamaha DXR/Mackie SRM etc) will make a fair acoustic amp, as long as it has an input gain range to suit your guitar’s output.Adding an outboard preamp device as mentioned above gives you an immensely flexible system. If you want to sing, too, or add other musicians, go for a small mixer.