Josh Scott on Neural DSP and John Mayer Breaking the Guitar World

There’s a video making the rounds right now. John Mayer is sitting in his studio, switching between his amplifiers — his actual 1964 Fender Vibroverb, his Dumble Steel String Singer #002, his Two-Rock prototype — and a software plugin that a company called Neural DSP built by modeling those exact pieces of gear. He’s playing. He’s listening. He can’t tell which is which.

Josh Scott: John Mayer And The Coming Simulacra:

Digital amp modelers have come a very long way in the past 20 years.

The folks at Neural DSP have created a machine learning stack that will take in live audio from amps, and use that to figure out how to model the sampled amp. They have a neat (physical) harness that randomly moves the knobs on a guitar amp they want to simulate (watch this timestamped YouTube video to see the harness and an explanation). That captured data is then used to train a guitar model. So instead of analyzing schematics to emulate tube amps, they sample the real thing and create a model based on that.

By all accounts it‘s very good.

But there have always been purists, or detractors, or people who are so good at hearing and understanding guitar tone that these software amps just weren’t