[ingvay7]

I shred guitar in the evenings to focus on technique, but a hectic day job means I get almost no time to twiddle knobs on my amp sim chasing the right tone. So I built a tool where I just prompt "Brian May Solo Bohemian Rhapsody" — the LLM fills a small JSON contract and feeds to a script that generates the XML, and I load it straight into the plugin. Two minutes and I feel like I'm tearing it up at Wembley '85 :)...almost.

The pattern generalized is LLM finds the presets,i can even upload a file to make it zone in, the code validates and loads into the plugin. Also using this contract/adapter approach for Terraform, game engine presets, CI pipelines, etc.

Wrote about it here: https://vishsubramanian.me/lm-guitar-tone-generator-polychro...

[sailfast]

This is really cool!

Seems like the key to the prompt it seems is the knowledge of how these tones were created in the first place (your system prompts for the 80s) which requires some actual tone knowledge and leaves all the fiddly bits to the LLM.

As someone relatively new to guitar this is intimidating, but also a fun rabbit hole. Additional “expert” prompts for different archetypes and genres could be fun.

[ingvay7]

thanks.Frankly — the system prompt is the sauce. The LLM has encyclopedic knowledge of every amp, cab, and pedal ever made which still blows my mind, but without guardrails it'll confidently tell you to boost mids on a JCM800 (which is how you disappear in a loud mix i've noticed). That era cheat sheet is all the working knowledge over the years of spectacularly failing to get the right tones.

Once someone does that encoding work for a genre, it's reusable forever I think. I'm pretty comfortable with late-80s/early-90s rock well enough to write the specs. But you're right — a "modern metal" prompt, a shoegaze one (which my teenager wants), a funkone,etc - that's the next layer. tone_system.md just needs to be updated. I plan to expand this to more plugins. Contributions welcome.

[sailfast]

Amazing! Even though they’re “just prompts” that knowledge is still important and valuable. Very cool. Unfortunately I’m just a guitar newb trying to figure out what pickups are doing things to my tone so you probably don’t want me in there :)

[BrokenCogs]

Very cool! I was thinking of doing this. One question, what made you choose polychrome dsp over something like neuraldsp?

[ingvay7]

No real reason really.In fact its on my list next. I was working on a track in logic that i was mostly sourcing the polychrome presets and i plan to add the same functionality to all my other plugins. The Gojira archetype is one i have my eyes on first