Guitar Sounds Processing

Improve Your Guitar Tone

Acoustic or electric guitar sounds will never go out of fashion. Luckily, today, we have many effect processors at our disposal, enabling us to enrich the guitar sounds even more. So check out an easy way to process your guitar sounds with style!  

JJP Guitars by Waves Audio

Waves Audio has joined forces with an American audio engineer and record producer, Jack Joseph, and made this excellent software. Here are a few words from Jack about this plugin: "I approach the guitar as a sound designer and try to use the whole sonic palette: Make it brighter, darker, more aggressive, compress it, bring out the attack, whatever—to give it attitude. The JJP Guitars plugin helps you get into that creative space quickly. Sure, there's a rock and roll edge to this plugin, but for me, it is so powerful that everything you need is right there in front of you; it lets you stay in the zone." I agree with him, and in the following tutorial, I will explore the JJP Guitars plugin in detail and present some practical audio examples.

The Interface

Right off the bat, we can see a straightforward interface without hidden menus. I consider this to be an advantage in comparison to the competition. At the bottom of the interface are 4 switches clearly titled with different genres. Therefore, you can pick your preferred style and start from there. The middle part is reserved for the effects; as I see it, this section is the plugin's core. Besides "Main" and "Master," there is a range of centered faders, which we will cover below. The Center Section faders represent the auxiliary returns with additional processing sent from the Main Section - pre-fader.

There is a dedicated mute button above each fader. Therefore, it may help to think of each plugin as a mini-mixing console. Edge, Warm, Sustain, Doubler, Reverb, Attack, and Presence are basically all the tools you could need to shape your guitar sound. On the left side of the interface, we can see a couple of knobs. The first one is "Sense," a parameter that controls the amount of all effects combined. Below are the "Low" and "Hi" parameters that function as a basic EQ. The last knob is called "Comp, "and as its name suggests, it is in charge of the amount of compression applied to the entire signal. On the right side of the interface, we can see a handy VU meter with In and Out switches, allowing you to monitor the signal level.  

Audio Examples

After the initial introduction, let's hear this plugin in action. I have chosen an acoustic guitar riff with a touch of reverb, so it's suitable for processing. Let us listen to it before processing and then with 3 effect variations from JJP Guitars.

~Ac. Guitar - Unprocessed

~Ac. Guitar - Processed with JJP Guitars 1

~Ac. Guitar - Processed with JJP Guitars 2

~Ac. Guitar - Processed with JJP Guitars 3