Guitar plugin
September 2025
I’d like to really understand guitar tone, so I’m making a guitar plugin to help me learn.
I am currently working on learning about DSP and ML to figure out my next move for this project.
My thinking is that an electric guitar generates an electrical signal that represents a sound wave. Waves are a bunch of numbers. It’s all just math. This must mean that if there’s a difference between the waves outputted by two different guitars, there must be some math that can be done to one wave to make it equal the other.
Part of my motivation is that, in the guitar world, there’s a lot of traditionalism coupled with a widespread lack of understanding of musical terms/concepts, how gear works, and even how the instrument itself works.
It’s not uncommon for people to refer to the bar that attaches to a guitar’s bridge and bends the pitch as a “tremolo bar,” despite having nothing to do with tremolos. There’s a lot of discussion around tone, usually about how basically anything can affect it. You can search “fretboard wood tone” and find a number of forum conversations and blog posts about how the type of wood a guitar’s fretboard is made out of has a noticeable impact on the tone. Some people claim that the fretboard wood makes an even bigger difference than the wood of the body. What kind of difference? “Rosewood sounds warmer” and “maple is brighter.”
Many swear that analog equipment sounds better than digital counterparts.
People buy multiples of the same model of guitar because they swear they sound different. People pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for vintage guitars from the 1960s, chasing a superior tone. Speaking of old guitars, the most popular guitar models in 2025 are still the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul, which were designed in 1954 and 1952, respectively. Why? Often it seems to be because “that’s what so-and-so played, and I want to sound like them.”
I am deeply skeptical about all of this and more, especially because a lot of it is very vibes-based, as opposed to being measured and shown objectively. Why not? Again, it’s all numbers.