I’ve been looking for some sort of workable solution to getting an acoustic-like sound from an electric guitar within Ardour. Since there aren’t any advanced modeling plugins for this purpose – something akin to whatever’s under the hood of the Boss AC-3 – and since I don’t personally have the skills to do such modeling AND since schematics for such a plugin available online appear to only show EQ changes, I figured I’d go the EQ route.
Today, I finally nailed it to my satisfaction. I found an incredibly helpful acoustic tone eq explainer, set up an acoustic strumming loop in ardour, and used TWO instances of a-EQ* to get the job done. Here is the result. Hopefully it’s useful to others. More comments below.
The top EQ shapes the upper ranges (high “airy” harmonics and string presence) while the bottom EQ shapes the lower end (bass, boominess, body and fullness). As you can see in the former, I boosted the strings and higher harmonics while cutting out the harshness between. On the latter, I cut the low bass and boosted the fullness/resonance + body while cutting the boominess out.
Notes:
- These settings are all a matter of preference. You may want more “boominess”, for instance. Have at it.
- Yes, I KNOW this doesn’t sound much like a real acoustic. But it does sound much more like an acoustic which is all I really need for my purposes.
- I felt it important to include my guitarix amp settings too, since they contribute massively to the overall sound while - in a way - not mattering at all. In other words, you could select a different amp/cab/tube model and knob settings, but then you’d have to adjust the a-EQ instances to compensate. These are the simply the settings that worked for me.
- Yes, two. I felt it more widely beneficial to craft a solution from the Ardour-based plugins (and Guitarix) than say “hey I found a solution, go download the Obscure Package EQ plugin from www.hopefullynotmalware.com”.
