Guitar Pedal Assistant

I believe in human creativity and don’t expect (or at all want) the robots to take over any time soon when it comes to making art in any medium. Every art has technical aspects, though, and if you’re working solo and trying to figure out how to express oneself, it is easy to get bogged down in some of those technical issues. This is where AI can be helpful in a constructive way and I’ve built a custom chatbot to that effect: Guitar Pedal Assistant.

The concept is simple:

• upload a clear photo of your pedalboard like the one of mine below
• Guitar Pedal assistant takes a look at the photo and figures out what you have
• you ask it questions about how to create particular sounds given the pedals you have
• you can even ask Guitar Pedal Assistant to help you emulate the sound of a favorite song (for example: “how do I create a guitar sound like the main guitar in Nirvana’s ‘Come as You Are'”)?
• if you don’t understand something, just ask!

I love that you can ask endless followup questions that help you learn at a deeper level. Why is Guitar Pedal Assistant suggesting reverb but not delay? Are there pedals that I don’t have that might be helpful in creating the kinds of sounds we’re talking about? How do compressors work?

To see how it works, start a conversation. Upload a photo of your pedal board (or use mine above to test things out) and you’re off! (Some sample sounds at the bottom of this post.)

I’ve played around with this for quite a while and most of the time Guitar Pedal Assistant’s suggestions are pretty solid. Sometimes they are off — this custom GPT has the same problems with “hallucinations” that any other AI chatbot has. I consider this a feature and not a bug in this context, though. The goal of Guitar Pedal Assistant is to help guitarists create cool sounds and even a “wrong” set of suggestions is going to be a learning experience that might lead to something exciting.

Try it out! I’d love to hear what you think (see my contact info). My goal here is not to enable people to just copy others’ sounds. It’s to help guitarists find their own sound(s), learn faster and more enjoyably, and provide support in making more music they love. Have fun!