Hi folks

First time I post in this forum.

I have developed a plugin that filters the signal from an undersaddle pickup of a guitar and gives it a more natural sounding charcter. In addition it also gives a stereo image similar to what the guitarist experience.
The filter is devised by measurement of the guitar body transfer function + some additional post processing.
Get the plugin from http://www.ijdata.com/bodilizer.zip
and feel free to try it out.

For the moment only the Crafer GAE 30 guitar body is implemented but it is still possible to try the guitar plugin with other guitars with under saddle pickups. There also exist some prerecorded raw material at http://www.ijdata.com/crafter_GAE30_w_BBand_UST.mp3
( somebody ought to hit the guitarist with something hard

Ingemar

Välkommen, Ingo!

From heavy-weight champ to plugin developer.

I’d love to try this one but I’m on a Mac and don’t play guitar (which means I have absolutely no business in this thread ).

/Yoss

wow... if this works .... it would be really welcome *gg*

thanks

mully

woooooaw!!!!

this plugin does what the author claims.

god job Ingemar Johansson.really, really, really impressive.

give it a try guys. it may become your main vst for guitar tracks.

thanks mate.

Can you share more info...

Yeah, I don't really understand what this plugin is supposed to do. Does is emulate an "undersaddle pickup?" What IS an undersaddle pickup? Do they sound crappy and need this plugin to sound good?

i hope the GUI doesn't look like a single cutaway ...

pough wrote:

Yeah, I don't really understand what this plugin is supposed to do. Does is emulate an "undersaddle pickup?" What IS an undersaddle pickup? Do they sound crappy and need this plugin to sound good?

An undersaddle pickup is the usual piezo pickup that's used in most acoustic/electrics.They pick up the string OK,but they sound flat because they don't really pick up the body resonance.
ew

Actually, this plugin sounds great on just about any acoustic guitar regardless of the source it was recorded from. Nice job!

hehe, thats top! Intriguing!

Hi

Under saddle pickups are good because they are very immune to external sounds. This is particularly good in live gigs as you get less problems with feedback, also the pickup does not pick up noise when one shift position on the fretboard.

The drawback is that they sound very flat (boring). Listen for instance to the guitar in the song "Into the fire" from the Springsteen DVD "Live in Barcelona" and you get the picture, I don't know if this guitar is under-saddle miced but it does not sound like a guitar at all.

The purpose of the plugin is simply to try to make it sound more like the "real" thing without the need to mic the guitar with an external mic and all the hassle this gives. The filters are derived in a controlled environment (studio or anechoic room), this makes it possible to get good quality filters.

Glad that some of you find the idea interesting and worth spending a little more time on.

Regards
Ingemar

BTW. I put away my gloves more than 40 years ago, still have not fully recovered from the punch that Floyd delivered.....

I don't have a guitar with an undersaddle pickup, but this is cool for adding resonance to things like plucked string models, too.

Wow, what an interesting post for your first. Welcome!
Its often intrigued me about the use of saddle pick-ups. There's nothing like miking an acoustic but for live use this is impractible, for the very reasons you've stated and because you have to sit still .
I'm actually looking at using my acoustic (under saddle pickup) adn electric guitars live through a laptop. One thing that worried me is the pickup in the acoustic.
I'm really looking forward to trying this when I get home this evening because it looks like you've hit a target!!!!
Thanks

Ingemar Johansson wrote:

BTW. I put away my gloves more than 40 years ago, still have not fully recovered from the punch that Floyd delivered.....

Yeah, that peek-a-boo left hook was deadly.

Good luck with the new plugin career.

/Yoss

Is this a wave guide then, like the ones found in Absynth and Tera?

sound great! is this still improving?

well I really liked the idea of this plugin and think it could be very usefull to me once my frickin pickup works again ....but I wasn't too fond of the GUI and hammered another one....

maybe someone likes it, too (for I do )



and no strangely shaped knobs this time... just sliders

cheers
mully

This plugin introduces a slight delay when I use it in Tracktion. PDC?

The delay should be ~46ms @ 44.1kHz. This is due to the use of circular convolution.
In a future version this will be replaced by partitioned convolution, the delay will then be in the area of 5ms.
My question to you guys is:
Is 5ms still too much and if so, what is the limit?

Ingemar

This is a really interesting plug, and does great things to the sound of my acoustic guitar samples.

The only problem is, on my 3gig P4 running FL Studio I'm getting some big "spikes" in CPU use. This produces crackles in the output if I also run a couple of other plugs at the same time. Is anyone else finding this problem?

It's a shame, because I love the sound this thing makes, really breathes life into the samples.

Ingemar Johansson wrote:

The delay should be ~46ms @ 44.1kHz. This is due to the use of circular convolution. In a future version this will be replaced by partitioned convolution, the delay will then be in the area of 5ms. My question to you guys is: Is 5ms still too much and if so, what is the limit? Ingemar

well as long as it supports plugin delay compensation it's totaly superduper

mully

Very interesting. I will give it a try.

I gave it a spin in Sonar 3PE with directixer. It did sound great for the 2 seconds that it worked. Thereafter it just refused to work properly. I recorded a single mono track, no other effects. Everytime I play it back with this plug it just give one spike and the audio would cut out (the sequencer keeps on running). When I let it run long enough the left channel started emiting some completly distorted sounds.

I think the problem may be with the long latency and Sonar's latency compensation not working together very well.

Just downloaded ... will give it a look.

What pushes me to give it a go is the flat sound that acoustic guitars give when recorded direct. Ingemar is right in this analysis.

Every time I record acoustic I'm thinking that it doesn't sound quite like what I played. The expression seems to vanish, like intense vibrato seems flatter than it should be.

Also ... I don't use a plec as I prefer fingers, but when recorded the hand noise seems just too loud (hey ... maybe this is just my shit playing and I'm deluding myself )

Ingemar:

Great work on the plug-in. It even adds nice "body" to my nylon string. The adjustment parameters are also very useful.

The only real issue is the latency introduced by the plug. I am using it in real time in Cubase SX and finding that the 46ms is definitely objectionable.

Interestingly, I applied the Bodilizer to the audio clip using SX's plug-in processing capability and there was still a delay in the processed file. I thought SX compensated for the delay when writing to a file?

Anyway if you can bring the delay down, or set it up to have the host do PDC that would be great!

I tried this on a set of my own samples taken from the Piezo output of a nice Maton acoustic/electric . The results are a major improvement on the plain samples.

Great work on this IJ.

Eg

Hi
Thanks for the overall positive response. I though I should recompile the dll to give a correct value of the plugin delay.
It will be a while until I have the low latency version running but I can atleast have it to deliver the correct latency value to the host application.

Tried to find the function name that does this in the VST-SDK but failed to find it. Anybody happen to know the name of this function ?

Regards

Oh, I forgot: You have to pass the delay in samples.

Thanks, I will upload a new beta after the weekend.

Ingemar

This is already a great plug-in - really brings life to any sampled acoustic guitar. i am very curious how this will develop further.

Thank You !

Richard

congrats on a great plug in, ive been trying it on other things too. eve presets and nusofting harp to name a couple . in mst cases it really seems to give sounds a much greater depth,(when solo'd anyway, i havent recorded and put it in a mix yet tho') on some sounds there is a slight sizzly crackle introduced and the latency is a bit big ,as stated in previous posts, but i look forward to hearing how this plug in develops. i am actually a guitarist but havent yet had time to try it on a recorded acoustic. i recomend anyone give it a go it really adds nice depth to some things thanks ingemar

Hi

As an intermediate step I have fixed the report of the plugin delay to the host (setInitialDelay(...).
You can get the modified plugin at
http://www.ijdata.com/bodilizer.zip
Hopefully this should work, frankly speaking, doing VST plugins is a completely new area to me.

Please note that the version number is unchanged, I hope to have a better version available in a few weeks with low latency and the possibility to import "fingerprints" from other guitars (or string instruments for that matter)

The plan is that the plugin should be available without copy protection, the reasons to this are many. This does not mean that the plugin will be for free however, rather I am looking/hoping for some payment based on "individual happiness" scenario here.

As a companion application (outside the VST world) I am developing an analyser application that makes it possible to model other string instruments. This application may be interesting for those who wish to get a plug that models the favourite guitar.
As the latter will require a good how-to-do description it will take a while before it becomes available.

Ingemar

Thanx Ingemar. Downloading now and will give it a spin.

Ingemar Johansson wrote:

The plan is that the plugin should be available without copy protection, the reasons to this are many. This does not mean that the plugin will be for free however, rather I am looking/hoping for some payment based on "individual happiness" scenario here.

since you say you are new to VST plugins, I thought I'd let you know that this is commonly called 'donationware'

For a great example of somebody else using this method, check out some of the plugins at www.smartelectronix.com (Bram, Ioplong and Magnus all have donationware plugs)

Hi folks

You can find an updated release of the Bodilizer at
http://www.ijdata.com/bodilizer.zip
It is now possible to select between two guitars, the Ephiphone model sounds pretty dull though.
I hope to add more models in the future.

The delay is still 46ms @ 44.1 kHz. I hope to bring down the delay to 3-6ms to the next release.

Good thing is however that it now works with other sample rates than 44.1kHz.

The manual is also cleaned up a little.

Download, listen and enjoy.

Regards
Ingemar

Ingemar this is a great plugin. I tried it in chainer with a wav file of a Fender electro-acoustic (Fishman pickup). VERY IMPRESSIVE..!

If you can make it work at 48k I will definitely use it and donate.

Ingemar Johansson wrote:

Hi folks Good thing is however that it now works with other sample rates than 44.1kHz. Regards Ingemar

oh my god......

it seems to have destroyed my speakers..... I was trying the latest release in Tracktion and it just made some frickin feedback noises and cracklingstuff and CPU didn't look too good, too....

must be a new bug for the very first version worked like a charm.... which I have now overwritten with the new one - damit

don't worry bout the speakers though guess it was just my ears

cheers
mully

okay don't worry I seem to be having some problems with my setup here... don't know what caused this so suddenly though

Hi
I have not yet tried any of the newer versions, but the results I got from just playing around with the first one was extremely satisfying

Way to go Ingemar ! A truly great idea for a VST and a good realisation of it too.

Can't wait to give the modified version a try.