Pickup modeling experiment

First of all, you don’t need a lot of gear. All you really need is a small speaker—maybe even a simple Bluetooth speaker—that you can lay flat on your guitar. You place your guitar flat, just like you would if you were doing some luthier work on it, and you put that speaker right above the guitar’s microphone, on the strings facing down. Now, you’ll send a test signal through that speaker. From what I’ve found, a simple sine sweep works best—just a short one, maybe around five seconds, and you can do a couple of them. You want to make sure the signal level is high enough so that it’s similar to the normal playing level of your guitar, but without clipping. Basically, you want the magnetic field variations from the speaker to mimic the same kind of magnetic response you get from your guitar strings. Remember, a speaker is just a magnet moving a membrane, so it kind of works in a similar way. In the first step, you’ll record that sine sweep with the original mic you want to use as your reference. Then you’ll do the exact same thing with the other mic you want to copy—let’s say you started with a humbucker and now you want to replicate a single-coil sound. You repeat the process with the single-coil pickup. If you have a guitar with multiple pickups, just place the speaker in the best spot so both pickups get a good, clear signal. Once you’ve got both recordings, line them up in your DAW so they’re perfectly in phase down to the sample. Then you can feed them into the Neural Amp Modeler, using your original mic recording as the source and the new mic recording as the target. After training the model, you’ll effectively get your humbucker to sound like that single-coil (or whatever mic you’ve chosen). And there you go—it works pretty well.