especially the Field Crickets (mostly genus Gryllus) and the Ground Crickets, and most especially the nymphs. I could possibly be wrong about this particular one too, but I don't think so.

G. sigillatus is a reasonable guess, and does look somewhat like this. Your "method" seems fine, it's just easy to take a wrong turn when it comes to Crickets (it's hard to find much information to help identify them). G. sigillatus is somewhat more slight of build and the pattern is somewhat different; the details of the stripes on the head are different, and the dark bands across the abdomen are generally strong and fairly obvious; an ill-defined, but obvious dark bar from eye to eye usually contrasts with the lighter pattern around it; the antennae are closer together with a large rounded pale spot between them.

The G. multipulsator specimens shown at Singing Insects of America are very dark, and don't show the pattern well, I wish there were more examples shown there, including some light individuals. If you look at photos of G. assimilis (a nearly identical eastern tropical species), you'll see that the pattern is the same. G. multipulsator was only recently separated from G. assimilis based on a different male song, and DNA evidence, but morphologically they are probably indistinguishable. That species varies from light to dark as well.

Most people just call them Crickets, and that's good enough, so you did well (and if I am wrong about the species - I did no better :0) . The classification and literature on the genus Gryllus has been a mess, largely because the leading Orthoptera experts of the early and mid 1900's lumped almost all of the American species together as if they were just one variable species, called them all by the oldest name - G. assimilis, and that was sort of the end of that. Any work on telling them apart that was published before that was largely ignored, and it took some time before most people started to recognize again that are actually quite a few species. Add to this the fact that they are all very very similar, and hard to tell apart, they are very difficult to identify, especially just from photos. They are only easy (sometimes) when you have singing males in hand. G. multipulsator happens to have a very distinctive song (easy to recognize, even if you don't see the insects). It has a "metallic" quality to it that is easy to hear, but hard to describe.

Gryllus multipulsator.

Moved from ID Request.