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 which enable 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 awesome piece of software. Here are a couple of words from Jack himself 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, what makes it so powerful is that everything you need, it’s right there in front of you; it lets you stay in the zone.”
I totally agree with him and in the next tutorial, I will try to explore in detail the JJP Guitars plugin and present some practical audio examples.
The Interface
Right of the bat, we can see a straightforward interface without any hidden menus. I consider this to be an advantage in comparison to the competition. In the bottom of the interface, there are 4 switches which are clearly titled with different genres. Therefore, you can pick your preferred style and start from there.
The middle part is reserved for the effects and as I see it, this section is the core of the plug-in. 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 plug-in 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” which is basically a parameter which controls the amount of all effects combined. Below that, there are “Low” and “Hi” parameters which 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 which consequently allow you to monitor the level of the signal.
Audio examples
After the initial introduction, let’s hear this plug-in in action. I have chosen an acoustic guitar riff that already has a touch of reverb, so it’s suitable for processing. Let us hear 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
Feel free to download the complete project here.
