Anybody else do this?

[RosewoodJoe]

My acoustic guitar is an acoustic/electric with discrete built in electronics, as so many of them are these days, but I rarely have occasion to plug it in. I just don't need to (although the built in tuner is awesome). But at home, I've started doing something that seems kind of useful- when practicing, I plug into my roland microcube and have the microcube face me, so I'm getting something more like the sound coming at my face, rather than out of the guitar's soundhole and away from me. I think that for practice purposes, it allows me to hear a different perspective and perhaps a little more of what's going on. On the other hand, you lose a little of the subtlety because it is now an amplified sound, but it seems a little useful, some of the time at least. Anyone else do something like this?

[Pitar]

I played plugged exclusively. There's never been an acoustic guitar I've been uber impressed with. So, I moved to a plugged classical (nylon string) guitar and create the sound I like rather than pretend there's a purely acoustic sound out there waiting for me to stumble upon.

[Christian Reno]

You are talking about the sound perspective of hearing your guitar head-on, so to speak, and I think there are benefits to that as you have found. A guitar does sound different from above, with the vibrating top and sound hole facing away from you. That is why many players like sound holes cut into the top-side of the upper bout of their guitars – they feel they hear a more direct sound, but in your example it is really a combination of the effect of an amplified sound along with the direct head-on aspect of the sound.

I know that I hear things I want to fix in the performance of a song more often when I am very slightly amplified. Those subtleties would have been somewhat lost on me had I not heard them amplified.