Originally Posted By: Bob Calver
to get the gibson sound like a strat you'll need a fair amount of eq! i have my humbuckers coil tapped to give single coil sounds and its not a bad compromise.

EQ will help, but even that won't be quite close enough! There's a fair bit of phase cancellation with humbuckers, given that they're essentially mixing the frequencies at two different positions on the strings. To do a really accurate sim you'd need a bunch of moving notch filters at frequencies relative to the two magnet positions on each pickup, as the frequencies being notched out change depending on the note and which string it's played on, and that doesn't even account for everything since some humbuckers intentionally mismatch coils and magnet strength and etc etc...


Originally Posted By: David Snyder
I am convinced that guitars have nothing to do with price or label--at all. I went through two music stores and played every single guitar they had for about four or five hours before I took home the Mexican Strat. There were $6,000 guitars that sounded just awful.

So, yeah, if you want a Strat sound, go to a store and spend a day playing every thing they have. That is my suggestion too.

I second that. Having worked at a guitar shop, I can assure you that price tag does not necessarily mean quality. We had a number of very high ticket instruments that played so poorly they should've slashed a zero off the sticker - one arrived from the factory with a 4-inch crack running down the neck and the paint was running into the crack, meaning it was cracked before painting and whoever painted it, whoever added the hardware, whoever did finishing fretwork, whoever strung and tuned it, and whoever QC'd and boxed it ALL missed it! Price tag at the time was around $4000.

Comparatively, the absolute best guitar I own is a Japanese-built Jackson electric, which was traded in when I worked there. I ended up paying under $300 for it, complete with Seymour Duncan pickups and the nicest gig bag I've ever had. The second best guitar I own is a 1981 Ibanez Strat knockoff that I paid $100 for complete with some very nice sounding ceramic pickups that a lot of people seem to despise on paper - personally I'd pit it against anything at least 10 times the price.

And, funny enough, one of the best playing guitars I played there was a hot pink Squier Strat with Hello Kitty all over it. Shoulda bought it. Oh well.


That said, back on topic, I've had mixed luck with plugins trying to change the inherent tone of the instrument, however I had good results from the old Peavey Revalver plugin doing a fairly realistic job of making humbuckers sound like single coils. To get accurate emulation they made you strum the guitar into the plugin to have it figure out the frequencies/overtones coming out, so they knew what needed to be EQ'd or whatever.


Originally Posted By: MarioD
PS - if you want to get an acoustic sound out of an electric you might want to try ReGuitar:

https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Product_ReGuitar/

This product is pretty amazing IMHO.

Blue Cat makes some great stuff!

I work here