Hi all. New to the forum, first post. I’m a fairly new user of Neural DSP plugins. I had tried some 14 day trial runs a good while back, particularly with the Soldano and the Darkglass plugins, and became an instant fan. With the recent anniversary sale, I snagged a few more, including the Fortin Cali, Tone King, and Morgan Amp suite. I mostly do recording with them (but I did just order the Behringer midi foot controller for live use–looking forward to trying that soon). Anyway, this idea entered my mind the other day, and it has opened up a huge pool of possibilities to me that I thought was worth sharing. So I was playing one of my guitars through the Fortin Cali suite the other day. The guitar is a custom built PRS-style solid body with a DiMarzio Super Distortion in the bridge, and a Super 2 in the neck (Excellent pairing, if I may say so.) I was creating a “hardcore metal” tone with the plugin to the best of my ability. The Super Distortion is quite a high output pickup, but it has a TON of low end and low mid content in the signal. I thought to myself, “This particular tone I’m going for would sound even better if I had an EMG81 in the bridge, but alas I don’t have a guitar with that pickup config.” That’s when my eureka moment happened. I pulled up Chat GPT and typed the following prompt: “What key frequencies would I want to boost or cut with a parametric EQ and what kind of compression (if any) would I want to employ to make a DiMarzio Super Distortion bridge humbucker sound and behave more like an EMG81 active bridge humbucker in a guitar plugged directly into Logic Pro while using an amp sim plugin?” The response from Chat GPT was incredibly detailed. I won’t post the entire response here, but I’ll say this–it gave me specific frequency ranges (like a low shelf 80-100Hz, or upper midrange 1.2-1.8kHz, for example), it told me how many db to cut or boost, and it even told me how wide or narrow to make the Q–for six separate freq range EQ adjustments. Then it instructed me to use a compressor to replicate the EMG81’s inherent compression, with details on attack, release, ratio, and threshold for targeted gain reduction. I followed the instructions from Chat GPT, and the results were INCREDIBLE. Now, I can’t say that I have an EMG81-equipped guitar on hand that I was able to use for comparison, but I’ve played guitars with EMG’s in them before, so I knew generally what to expect. But the low end tightness and the clarity was there, and the compression was there. It was like I had swapped pickups, but I had achieved this with only a parametric EQ and a compressor (in line before the Fortin Cali plugin) in Logic. Suddenly, I don’t need to mess with pickup swapping any more. I proceeded with multiple other tests, like “how to make my Les Paul PAF humbuckers sound and behave like Seymour Duncan JB humbuckers,” for example. And then things like, “how to make my Strat single coils sound and behave more like vintage Strat pickups”–all utilizing specific parametric EQ adjustments and compression. Is it EXACTLY like the real thing? I don’t know, probably not. But is it SO CLOSE that I can’t tell? Yeah. Is it achieving the kind of results I was hoping for? Absolutely. I was already having a blast with these plugins from Neural DSP, because the tones are outstanding and sound as real as can be. But now with this added factor, there are no limits. So, just wanted to share with the community here, in case anyone else would enjoy exploring it.
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Thanks for sharing and welcome to the community!
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