PreorderEffect

Guitarabin

A fixed pedalboard for spacious guitar.

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Includes beta access today and the finished release at launch.

The demo is a beta preview of what you are preordering.

How to use Guitarabin

Guitarabin interface

What it does

A stereo pedalboard for guitar phrases that need grit, movement and space. Five sections, Drive, Echo, Spring, Pulse and Air, shape the whole sound without you having to assemble a pedal chain.

The idea

Guitarabin is a pedalboard, not a rack: the stages run in a fixed order and cannot be repatched. It draws on two instrumental guitar sounds that come from small boards left in one order and simply played: the wet, dark, reverb-soaked tone associated with Khruangbin, and the desert, spaghetti-western tone of Hermanos Gutierrez. Both run a compressor into an essentially clean amp, lean on tape echo and sit in spring reverb, so the chain here is what they share: compression, a low-gain boost that thickens without distorting, a darker tone stage, modulation, then the two time effects that do most of the work.

One detail defines the sound. The spring reverb comes before the tape echo, the reverse of the usual advice. Every repeat is a copy of an already reverberant signal, so the echoes grow more diffuse as they decay and melt into a wash instead of staying discrete. That order is welded in place, because it is the character of the board.

Works with

  • Your browser: it plays on this page, with nothing to install.
  • Planned for the finished release: Audio Unit, VST3, Standalone app.

What you get

  • A playable browser preview
  • Compression, boost, tremolo, spring reverb, and tape delay
  • Additional native plugin formats planned for release

Preorder pricing is discounted and increases at launch. Your feedback during beta helps shape the finished release.

Perpetual license. One-time acquisition. Keep using the major version you acquire, with no subscription required. Future major versions and online services may be offered separately.

Guide and controls

How it works.

The pre-chain is fixed and conventional: a peaking biquad for the parked wah, a compressor, a waveshaper, then a shelf pair for tone, then the two modulation stages. The drive curve is a tanh capped at about 9x pre-gain, which is low - the stage is there to thicken and boost, and running it as a distortion is not a sound either reference rig makes.

The two modulation stages are genuinely different effects and are wired that way. Tremolo is an LFO summed with a DC offset into a gain, with the offset set to 1 minus half the depth so the effect swings around unity instead of only ducking. Vibrato is an LFO on a delay line's time, which is a real pitch shift; depth is specified in cents and converted through the delay-modulation relation (peak pitch deviation is 2*pi*rate*swing), then clamped under the centre tap so the line can never go negative.

The delay is a single tap with the feedback path damped and saturated before it returns, so repeats both darken and compress as they pile up - the tape behaviour, rather than a clean digital repeat that eventually clips. Tape Age moves the damping corner from 8 kHz down to 1.8 kHz and simultaneously opens a slow LFO on the delay time for wow and flutter, because on a real machine those are the same fact about the same worn transport.

The reverb is a small feedback-delay network - four short diffusion delays in series feeding four damped parallel combs - not a convolver. That is a deliberate split of responsibility with Space Mini, which does own a convolution reverb: an FDN gives a decay knob that actually re-tunes the tail, and comb feedback is derived from the target decay by the standard relation g = 10^(-3t/RT60). The tail is damped harder than the output, so highs die before lows.

The panel exposes ten knobs, not twenty. Several are macros that fan out to more than one engine value, because the pedals they stand in for do too: one Echo knob moves repeat spacing and wet level together, and Feedback carries tape age with it, since more passes over the head is what wear actually is. That expansion lives in one function in the plugin's schema, which both the plugin and this page call, so a knob means the same thing in a DAW as it does here.

Width is a mid/side matrix on the wet path only, fed by a decorrelated copy of the chain output - a mono pedal chain has no side component at all, and no amount of matrixing invents one. Below halfway the tail collapses toward the centre while the dry note keeps its own image untouched.

What would you make with Guitarabin?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Part of Tetra Box rack

Goes well with.

Prototype

Convolution reverb: eight synthesized spaces, twenty-five real cabinets.

Prototype

Tube-style drive into a real cabinet.

Prototype

Drive, tone, and bounded feedback delay.