Show HN: SmartGuitarAmp – Guitar plugin made with deep learning

Re:Show HN: SmartGuitarAmp – Guitar plugin made with deep le... by manmal on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:35AM (#24743943)

Interesting that Kemper hasn’t been mentioned yet. They are a German company who make profiling amps, which basically consist of software able to profile an existing amplifier within ~2 minutes, and then perfectly replicating it. In an interview the inventor said that they have only on the order of 30 parameters which are configured during the profiling process, in which the device sends certain signals through the amplifier, and analyses the output. To make it stage-ready, it also has hundreds of effects and pedals (delay, wah, fuzz,...) on board.

Those Kemper profiling amps are widely used in the music industry, from hobbyists to absolute professionals. There are studios who profiled their 100s of custom amps with different mic pickup settings, and now only use the profiling amp instead. Paul Gilbert has one, and loves it, and he is reaaally picky about sound.

Apart from profiling your own amps, there is also a vast online library of profiles uploaded by community members. So if I want my amp to sound like Green Day, or just pick a certain amp like a Mark IV, I just search for that, load a matching profile into the profiling amp, and try it out. A plethora of parameters like gain can additionally be adjusted like on a normal amp - the profiling process somehow accounts for those parameters too.

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Re:Show HN: SmartGuitarAmp – Guitar plugin made with deep le... by gianlucahmd on Sunday October 11, 2020 @04:33AM (#24744483)

Kemper is an amazing product, one of the few true innovations in guitar gear in ages.

However, it still fails to model the response of a nice tube amp to dynamics. It gets close, but not quite there.

This is why people like Paul Gilbert use it: he plays with so high gain and compression that dynamics would be basically flat.

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Re:Show HN: SmartGuitarAmp – Guitar plugin made with deep le... by manmal on Sunday October 11, 2020 @06:21AM (#24744830)

That’s an interesting take for sure, and I think I read about this caveat elsewhere. Let me just add that Paul Gilbert has a very broad musical range - there surely is a lot of high gain shredding (at least in earlier days), but he‘s also doing amazing work with clean settings and acoustic guitars. His hearing is not the best though, so maybe subtle differences in dynamics escape him :)

Personally I think that most problems people report about Kemper‘s sound stem from their speaker setup. If you use it for audio recordings or for loud stage setups, you most likely won’t be able to tell any difference. There are lots of blind tests out there and people often think that the Kemper is the real amp.

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