BlueCat Re-Guitar -- More than a pickup-switching sim

[GreyLion]

Last week, BlueCat was kind enough to send me a preview copy of Axiom's Re-Guitar. There may be changes in the code by the time it's fully released, of course.

I'm still a total fanboi for Axiom, and I'm enjoying Re-Guitar after a lot of experimentation. As with Axiom, it's a tweaker's paradise, and it likewise forces me to re-conceptualize exactly what it is and does, regardless of marketing. I'm writing about it now, not because I fully understand it, but because I've burnt my ears badly from playing with it for too many hours this week. I have to stop now.

I'm not sure what's going on under the hood, but it's more than just dynamic EQ, tilting, and notch filtering. Different settings can be subtle or obvious, though they never get extreme. Sometimes the difference is inaudible with single-string riffing, and totally in-your-face with strumming. This isn't a tool for mangling audio, and it's definitely not just a preset machine. I have a suspicion that it can probably do some magic with synth and sampler tones, but I'm not that guy.

As a guitarist, I appreciate that I CANNOT make it suck tone. It all sounds good, in different flavors. BlueCat has a user manual that shows how to tone-match your pickups with the input pickups if you want the most accurate emulations. Of course, you can abuse that if you're not concerned with accuracy.

It's loadable in Axiom's Select menu under 'Built-In FX'. Once you've loaded it, most commonly in the first or second effects slot in Axiom's Input section, you can surf through the approximately 200 presets available from its dropdown. These affect only Re-Guitar, not the entire Axiom chain. There are also 23 presents under the main Axiom dropdown that do affect the chain, mostly by changing amps and their corresponding gain, eq, etc., with often a compressor, reverb, or delay added into the effect slots around Destructor.

If you want to step away from presets and go on your own personal Tone Quest, as us guitarists usually do, you should select E-Custom or AC-Custom as your targets. This let's you move freely around the X-Y matrix for pickup sim settings. Also, feel free to lie to it about what your original pick-ups are. Pics at the bottom of this post.

There are more adjustments you can make with the Hollow Body and gain and eq knobs, but lets get down to it:

Yes, humbucker to single-coil sims, and single-coil to humbucker sims are in there, very convincingly to my ears. I like that I can now get a medium-gain buzz-free single coil tone out of my ax, without having to play games with EQ and noise suppressors, which usually results in tone-suck. I don't own a P90-equipped guitar, and haven't played through one for decades, so can't speak to that.

However -- Re-Guitar did not turn the sound of any of the pickups on my Number One electric, a Hagstrom UltraLux with an HSH with coil-splitting pick-up configuration, into the live sound of my Number One acoustic, a Martin DC1E. It may be impossible to convincingly convert electric to acoustic without some incredibly heavy DSP and resynthesis.

But I could get it to sound kindasorta acoustic'ish. Your ears may vary, and, like I said, mine are toasted right now. One thing that helped was changing how I finger-picked. I've spent a lot of time trying to play better legato, and achieve more sustain, but I found that attacking the strings for a more percussive sound, then pulling off or muting quckly to simulate the quick decay inherent in an acoustic, was beneficial. it also seemed to help to move to a softer, more flexible pick when strumming, to try to add back a little of that resonant smear that acoustics have. I also usually had to roll off higher frequencies. Something weird often happened with the B and high-E strings, especially with a little gain on them. It got piercing and artifacty, whether I was inputting through a humbucker or a single-coil. Totally clean tones, not so much a problem there. This might be just down to my guitar.

So. This is a thoroughly useful and innovative addition to the tone-shaping abilities of Axiom. I haven't yet used it to see how much it can help with simulating double-tracking in left and right channels with different guitars, but am looking forward to that when my ears have recovered a bit.

Four thumbs up.

[donkey tugger]

Good, interesting post, cheers.

However -- Re-Guitar did not turn the sound of any of the pickups on my Number One electric, a Hagstrom UltraLux with an HSH with coil-splitting pick-up configuration, into the live sound of my Number One acoustic, a Martin DC1E. It may be impossible to convincingly convert electric to acoustic without some incredibly heavy DSP and resynthesis.

But I could get it to sound kindasorta acoustic'ish. Your ears may vary, and, like I said, mine are toasted right now. One thing that helped was changing how I finger-picked. I've spent a lot of time trying to play better legato, and achieve more sustain, but I found that attacking the strings for a more percussive sound, then pulling off or muting quckly to simulate the quick decay inherent in an acoustic, was beneficial. it also seemed to help to move to a softer, more flexible pick when strumming, to try to add back a little of that resonant smear that acoustics have.
Four thumbs up.

Assuming that it's similar to the Line 6 Variax in terms of the acoustic simulation response, you're spot on about using thinner picks. You also get better results by using pointy ones (no sharkfins!) and you've got to lay off a bit more than you would on an acoustic (I tend to get a bit 'enthusiastic' with the strumming at times.. ), and thicker strings will give a better acoustic tone (to a point). As I said in the other thread, the Variax (and I'm assuming this will be similar) wouldn't ever replace a mic'd up acoustic for me for prominent parts, but it's very useful for quickly adding a bit of rhythm acoustic, and of course, a godsend for playing late at night!

[bill45]

Does it have bass pickup sims ?

[GreyLion]

Do you mean, can it make your guitar sound like a bass? Nope, it's just messing with the spectrum, not shifting pitch -- but Axiom has a pretty good Pitch Shifter built in. In any case, none of the presets listed bass pickups as a sim choice, if you're just talking about getting that sort of frequency response.

I just finished messing with it in response to your question. You can set it to an octave down and it tracks VERY well. I have an older rig, so I had to set look-ahead time pretty high in order to avoid artifacts. I'm not a bass guy, but I tweaked by setting a compressor first in the chain, then the pitch shifter, then Re-Guitar.

Sounded pretty good to me after I messed with the settings in them all, especially when I told it that the original input pickup was single coil, but actually used the neck pickup in humbucker mode on my guitar. Then I moved the X-Y crosshairs around in the E-Custom window, for various tonalities. Adding in Melda's MdoubleTracker at the end of the chain was pleasing.

I tried out a couple of IRs in Torpedo WoS, but it was awful. On the other hand, I don't own any 1x15 IRs, so those might be better.

In any case, I could get it to sound pretty good to my ears. But it didn't ever sound like a P-Bass. Attack felt wrong'ish to me no matter what I did, so maybe a transient shaper might help. Kush's Omega 458a after the pitch shifter sounded pleasing to me, but I think it's magic just about anywhere at any time. YMMV, and there are so many ways you can intervene in the sound in Axiom that further experimentation might be fruitful.

[GreyLion]

donkey tugger -- Glad to get some validation from you about the picks and the sim! I was in a band once with a rhythm player who used a Variax. I tried it for a few minutes, but it just felt and sounded so, so wrong... Of course, that was a long time ago and I was much more of a purist then... Anything that diverged too much from Strat>OD/Distortion>Deluxe was of the devil...

[Blue Cat Audio]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the Re-Guitar preview. It is now available for all!

Does it have bass pickup sims ?

No, it does not have bass pickups included. You can however use it on bass guitar, it gives interesting results!

Do you mean, can it make your guitar sound like a bass? Nope, it's just messing with the spectrum, not shifting pitch -- but Axiom has a pretty good Pitch Shifter built in. In any case, none of the presets listed bass pickups as a sim choice, if you're just talking about getting that sort of frequency response.

The problem with using a pitch-shifter to simulate a bass guitar is that the entire spectrum is shifted, so there are higher harmonics missing. If you are using distortion it may fill the gap and sound ok, but for clean tones it will never sound right.

[hotmitts]

This does look interesting
Thanks for the review