Would this be possible? [pickup impulses]

Fun111

Fun111

Inspired
I had an interesting thought.

Using Fractal's tone match I recently started playing with putting the tone match as the first block in the chain, plugging for example my strat in on the bridge pickup and taking a reference, then plugging in my Mayones in (again on bridge with a humbucker) playing the same thing, taking a snapshot then matching it to the strat pickup reference.

I was really surprised by just how well this worked and had an idea.

If we could have a 'control' impulse (eg completely flat) and match it to a pickup impulse then save it as a pickup impulse - eg DiMarzio X2N. Someone else could then match their pickups to the control then apply the 'DiMarzio X2N' to the result and - not necessarily 100% accurately - try the pickup out.

Has anyone else tried this? Anyone want to try exchanging some pickup impulses? Anyone any ideas for making this accurate? I'd really like to look into this and hear if Fractal have any thoughts :)
 
Knowing Fractal's experience in such things. ANYTHING reasonable = possible. You speak of something which is real, unique and isolate-able. So it would reason that you are on to something which is certainly possible. I think that you tossed something out there which is a pretty cool idea. I would love to hear from FAS on this idea. It would be cool to have a poll to see if others would find such a feature to be of interest..

I like it!
 
I really would like this too. For studio use it'd be awesome to be able to take a dry recorded Les Paul and reamp it to give it a single coil tone (more stratty) to blend as a layer.

Live it'd be great if I didn't have to switch guitars for a song that needed a single coil tone in parts.

I know it wouldn't be perfect but it would be awesome.

EH has a pedal called the knock out that kinda does it, it'd be good to have a model of that, or ever a new kind of effect that's more like a dynamic EQ to get closer to the sonic behaviors of the real thing
 
I do this with my Taylor T5. It doesn't have the greatest acoustic sound by itself, nor electric sound, but I tone matched the acoustic setting to my Gibson J-30 and the electric to my Les Paul Custom, and both sounds got MUCH better. It's not a perfect match, but the acoustic sounds acoustic now, and the electric electric.
 
Wouldn't this have similar issues to running cabs sim thru a cab instead of a FRFR speaker? You'd need a FRFR pickup.
Is anyone else besides Line 6 with the Variax trying to accomplish this on the guitar end of things?
I almost bought one until I looked on their forums and saw the QC issues and how easy it was to brick the electronics with a firmware upgrade.
 
That's why I said match it twice :)

So if you match you pickups to a fixed impulse, and everybody matches that impulse their pickups (that will be tried) then you essentially have to layer 2 impulses one over the other - one to cancel out your existing pickup's impulse, one to apply the new pickup so everyone can take tone matches of their pickups from the same reference.
 
finny47 said:
Wouldn't this have similar issues to running cabs sim thru a cab instead of a FRFR speaker? You'd need a FRFR pickup.
Click to expand...

I don't think that's necessarily true for all applications. The typical guitar speaker doesn't have much response above 5-7khz--there's a big high-end rolloff that you wouldn't want to double up by then running that through another cab. The same wouldn't necessarily be true of pickups. For my T5, there's a lot of high-end shit in there I don't want when I'm going for an electric sound, so tone-matching it to a humbucker works really nicely. I'm not sure it would work so well trying to go from a humbucker to a single-coil sound, since you might be trying to bring out frequencies that aren't there to begin with. I haven't tried it, though, so I could be surprised.
 
This has been brought up a few times already-So unique it isn't. I am game for anything that doesNOT take away from the power and functionality I have now, not even one little bit. Not saying the idea is bad but, I don't know-guess I am just an old school rocker-If I want sc, I use a Strat. If I wasnt HB's I use HB's. But hey that's just me. Go for it.
 
That would be possible to do with a hex-pickup (processing the six strings separately). Like the Roland VG99 that can not only model pickups, it can also model the pickup position, different guitars and other stringed instruments, nylon strings, other instruments etc... Note that the VG is not a synthesizer; it is an actual guitar modeler.

Actually, I dream that Fractal Audio develops something like a Axe-Hex: V-guitar with Fractal Audio quality.
 
The idea was more in the context of 'trying' pickups. Forgetting singles to humbuckers and old school rocking, I've successfully tone matched my D-Activator to my D-Sonic, and to a Duncan 59 and it translates extremely well, the only problem is its like demoing the pickup in someone else's guitar, but it's better than nothing.

I'm suggesting if can agree on a procedure, we can exchange pickup models in a similar way to cabs. Someone here may have (for example) the new DiMarzio supermegareallycool pickup that I want to get a feel for but can't try without paying real money, a model will at least give a rough idea and has worked well for up to now.

Just seeing if anyone has any thoughts as to how we could do this or make it more accurate.
 
Here is an article for reference:
http://buildyourguitar.com/resources/lemme/

But it would be better if you had a circuit in your guitar with a knob that allowed you to vary the capacitance. This capacitance controls what frequency the resonance frequency peak of the pickup lies. The resonance peak according to the article is responsible for 90% of the pickups sound. Most pickups have a peak between 2k and 5k. Warmer pickups usually have a lower resonance frequency peak (go figure).

So to do what is being discussed it would first be best to have this circuit installed in your guitar and match the resonant peak of guitar 1 to guitar 2. Then do a tone match. Still not perfect, but much closer.
 
Hi all,

I was thinking about this a while ago and how it could be achieved. I'm an Ultra user still so I can't try it out, but from a process point of view, capturing and sharing pickup profiles would probably look something like this.

Process:
1. agree on a best set of chords phrases to play on the instrument in the capture process. Cliff's Cliff boogie for example..
2. Record the above to a high quality file. Dry guitar only.
3. Test this file to create pickup/guitar profile. Try two different guitars.
4. Create a database and share the audio files of the dry guitar. Include instrument detail: guitar type, pick ups, pickup position..

So this would mimick actually having the instrument (sort of), and would allow the best flexablity.

Would this work? Can anyone test it out?

Darren
 
If you could match the resonant peak I dare say the requirement for such a tone match would be less. I'm glad you posted an article such as the one you did, it's the exact logic I used to come to the conclusion that this could be made accurate digitally.

I'm gunna make some clips of Guitar A, Guitar B and Guitar A matched to B and see how they come out and post.
 
Theres more to a pickup than eq spectrum, the resonant peak and its height change things drastically, and the pickups individual output , not sure how you'll emulate those details.

An alternative is match Eq ing di tracks from two different guitars and then reamping. I've done this before with good results.
 
If you had a guitar with an hex pickup and onboard processor, you could model the pickups right in the guitar.

You could probably even model ac instruments like ac guitar, dobro, banjo along with popular electrics like les pauls, strats, tele's and gretsch's.

Then you could switch from SC to humbucker to acoustic, heck maybe even a 12 string.

Match a guitar like that up with a modeler / efx unit so they communicated digitally, that would be an awesome system!

Richard
 
I think it's possible, but you'd have to narrow down all the variables too. You could easily have 2 pickups and tone match them, but you'd also have to figure out if you want to tone match them at the same height, or at the "optimal" height for each specific pickup. Things like that... either way it's a fantastic idea, if it can be pulled off.
 
@Moltenmetalburn Well that's just it, resonant peak is just a point of higher amplitude in the frequency spectrum, there is absolutely no reason this can't be modelled using an impulse. In other words, resonant peak is just a spike in the EQ spectrum. It can be emulated by having the specific frequencies gained or attenuated such that they translate from their gain on one pickup to the gain on another - the principle of tone matching.

@ConnorGilks well in the same way a cab impulse is a snapshot of the cab in a certain room with a certain mic a certain distance and orientation from the speakers, so would a pickup IR be a snapshot of a particular pickup a particular distance from certain strings in a certain guitar with certain controls and cable etc, it would indeed be an approximation.
 
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