GuitarML: The SmartAmp

A free amp emulation plugin, trained using WaveNet neural networks.

5 December 2023

GuitarML founder, Keith Bloemer, is an aerospace engineer and guitar player. What started as a passion project has grown into a community of developers and musicians that contribute time and brainpower to make a great product. GuitarML uses machine learning and related technologies to create high-quality guitar tones. Advances in deep learning (artificial intelligence) have made it possible to play near-perfect tonal matches of real amps and pedals through a plugin. While there are many guitar plugins out there, GuitarML’s plugins are unique in that they use advanced machine learning to model the dynamic response of real amps and pedals. GuitarML is working to make this technology easy and accessible to musicians, developers, and AI researchers.

The SmartAmp is a guitar amp plugin made with JUCE, using neural network models to emulate real world hardware. This plugin uses a WaveNet model to recreate the sound of real world hardware. The current version models a small tube amp at clean and overdriven settings. Gain and EQ knobs were added to modulate the modelled sound. Users are also able to create their own models and load them in SmartGuitarAmp with minor code modifications. To train your own models, use PedalNetRT.