Picked up a Fishman Aura pedal for "Orchestra" (OM) sized guitars yesterday. It's a pretty useful pedal, IMHO.
There's three knobs, a phase switch (to assist with feeback problems) and a footswitch
The footswitch is kind of funny. This is a pedal you leave ON. I guess it's to A/B with the peizo sound, or something. Maybe if you use it live - some songs with a band (piezo only), and some solo with the pdeal. Like if you were Neil Young, or something.
The knobs are a volume control, 16-position selector switch and a balance knob to blend between the Aura sound and the straight piezo sound.
The Aura technology is pretty interesting - it's kinda like modelling, but not really.
The 'images' are of sixteen different OM-sized guitars, and correct the sound between what the guitar sounds like with a mic and what the piezo picks up. (they have different pedals for different guitar types).
It's NOT designed to make your guitar sound like another guitar. It's designed to make the piezo signal from your guitar sound like your guitar sounds with a mic.
Of the sixteen, one's really quite good, three more are OK, eight are middling, and four or so are horrendous with bizarre spikes and phase issues that make my guitar sound like a resonator in a metal tank. Of course, if I was using a different guitar, the ones that work would be different, and the ones that sound horrible might even be the best.
I found the best ones using a trick I found in one of the reviews. I plugged the guitar into a looper first, Aura second, made a loop, and tested each position without the interference of sound from the guitar. Once I found the best ones, I A/Bed the loop/Aura with the unplugged guitar.
I suspect the one I'm using was probably made with my exact guitar, a Larrivee OM-05 with a Fishman Matrix pickup. It's not like a rare model. Others, I'm sure would be Martin OM-18 & OM-28, whatever the Taylor mahogany and rosewood models are, etc. I suspect they concentrated on guitars in the $1K-$2Kish range, as that's probably the target market. People who spend $500 or less aren't going to spring $200 for a preamp, and people who spend over $2K would buy the Aura Blender with exact specified model images, if they decided to go this route.
I did some recording with the one best preset (I don't see any reason to use any other), and it works quite well, certainly for the demo-quality stuff I'm doing. If it was for a real CD, I'd use a mic, obviously.
Once I get the demos together, I'll have them up on my website.
In live performance, you can use the blender to add back some piezo to tame feedback, or if you just like the sound better.
Well worth the $$, IMHO, especially with the Music123 15% off coupon they're offering right now.. ;-)