Let’s do some real magic today with the brand new Re-Guitar plugin: in this tutorial we are going to learn how to turn a single coil sound (typical strat neck pickup) into a hollow body jazz guitar sound, without modifying the guitar… Impossible? Check this out!
Step 1: Open Re-Guitar and select the source pickup that you will be using in the “From” section. In our case this is a single coil neck pickup, and I opted for the bright single coil as the one I have on my guitar is pretty bright (this depends on your own guitar).
Step 2: You have a few options here: you can either go for the different pickup models listed in Re-Guitar or you can make your own one using the custom icons. For our jazz guitar tone, I found the custom mode to be more practical as it allows me to morph between different pickups, but feel free to test other options. So just click on the E-Custom icon.
Step 3: Grab the green icon in the custom mode and move it around to hear the different sounds. After a few tests I ended up putting it around the Classic Bucker icon, but try to experiment other options too: the possibilities are endless here.
Note: use the mouse wheel to zoom in and get more precision to setup the tone!
Step 4: Let’s now add some body to the guitar – the pickup change isn’t enough for this, as we want the sound of a hollow body jazz guitar. For this, have a look at the knobs in the “Hollow Body” section. After a lot of tweaking and testing I ended up going for these settings: Thickness = 100%, Amount = 50%. You can also try out Thickness = 50% and Amount = 75-100%, but for some reason I preferred first one. My idea was to get close to a typical George Benson jazz tone.
Step 5: During all these steps, be sure to check the resulting sound and compare it with what you’d like to obtain.
Step 6: Let’s roll back the brightness and tone to warm up the tone a bit, we should be really close to a nice and warm jazz sound by now.
Here is a video to demo this jazz guitar tone using the Axiom software:
Do you like it? You can download my presets for both Axiom and Re-Guitar here:
– Preset AXIOM – Benson
– Preset Re-Guitar – Strat Single to Jazz Double
Enjoy!
