Acoustic tone from electric guitar?
Hey, NAMmers!
TL;DR; if you own a guitar with combination of a magnetic and piezo pickup - we need you!
Yesterday I discovered NAM and I got very very excited! Today I already started capturing all my uncomplicated analog stuff and exploring tone3000.
For capturing and training I use hardcore Python and NVIDIA GPU, as I am also a fan of ML, PyTorch and Lightning (if you now what I mean).
Now the idea: Can we get a natural piezo acoustic tone from an electric guitar?
It would be cool if it would possible to get acoustic tone playing on singles/humbuckers. I know there modules in digital modellers but those are (I believe so) combination of dynamic compression and EQ.
I think we need to try to do it NAM way.
What is the plan?
We need to gently ask those of you who are lucky enough to have Godins, ESPs, PRSes, Music Mans or any other guitar with the combination of electric and piezo pickups. Also the guitar must have two separate outputs so you could record both of them at the same time in isolation.
So the setup must be:
- connect both outputs into two Hi-Z inputs of a sound card
- no processing on either output (we need natural original guitar tone both for electric and piezo pickups), if you are absolutely sure about your piezo tone - you can use a nice hardware compressor and/or an EQ for the piezo output. So all your unique hardware will be part of the final model. Absolutely no spatial effects (delay, reverb). Absolutely no any processing for the recording of the magnetic pickup.
- set piezo eq to some neutral flat settings and maximum possible level without clipping
- record two tracks: one for the electric pickup and one for the piezo pickup
Playing must be:
- record multiple individual notes with different level of volume
- record chords with different levels of volume
- record artificial harmonic with different levels of volumes
- record strumming with different levels of volume
- record different random picking noises with different levels of volume
- record all kind of insanely crazy string actions, slides, picking, kicking, licking
- if you have a tremolo bar would be nice to make a dive bomb
- play on different strings and in different positions
- switch the electric pickup switcher to another magnetic pickup and repeat
- would be nice to have 3-5 minutes or even more of different sounds, tones, and playing in different styles.
You do not have to play melodic and professional, basically it is totally OK if you cannot play at all, we just need sound sample pairs.
Result:
After all the result is a pair of WAV tracks. Would be nice if you can record them in 48kHz and 24bit, as this is default sample format for NAM. Pack both WAV tracks, compress into ZIP archive and share with the community.
The task overall is much harder and noisier than a normal NAM training, but the more examples we have, the more robust the training will be.
Success is not guaranteed, this is just an experiment, but I promise I will apply all my skills.
Also I believe here we have a lot of enthusiasts who also know about `input.wav`, `output.wav` and `nam-full` BASH script.
UPD1:
I found https://www.tone3000.com/tones/di-guitar-acoustic-simulator-50323 and it sounds pretty good with the removed low frequencies and a compressor on top.
UPD2:
As a proof of concept I created a NAM model using a good and expensive VST3 acoustic guitar plugin, so I could use it live with a NAM hardware player.
I cannot share the NAM model itself, as it will definitely be a violation of the license. But I can share the example.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cOmIiGZGOoj0bMIduDsrNoURJTeGtCkn
- `input.wav` - what I used as input for the training (the standard `input.wav` didn't work well). You will need to record something like this, the longer the better, the more diverse the better.
- `acoustic-test.mp3` - the example how the final NAM capturing model works, I've used a stratocaster with middle pickup.