Sponsored by
How I found a faster way to get the guitar tones in my head to my mix with Positive Grid's Project: BIAS X
The way we make music has changed. A plethora of digital modelers, available in both hardware and plugin forms, has made recording great guitar tones accessible to anyone with a computer.
With this, however, comes thousands of almost infinitely tweakable options. Great if you have the time, but what if there was a way to cut through it all, and get straight to the tone that’s in your head? Enter Positive Grid with Project: Bias X.
No stranger to the guitar plug-in game, Positive Grid has built BIAS X with an all-new DSP engine to make their guitar amp, cab, and effects models sound and feel more realistic than ever. Of which we have 33 amps and 63 effects (at the time of writing), that cover everything from warm, jazzy cleans to all-out, melt-your-face distortion.
If you are prone to the dreaded option paralysis, this may sound like something that will only add to the problem. However, it is exactly this that BIAS X looks to address with an impressive AI-driven interface that aims to get the user straight to the tone in their mind.
The potential time saving is huge
There are two ways to interact with it. Text to tone, which involves describing the sound via the AI’s chat box, or music to tone, which nails down a guitar sound from a user-uploaded track. In both cases, it’s only a few moments before BIAS X presents a preset that can be tweaked through more dialogue with the AI, or manually diving into the controls on the amps and effects in the preset it has come up with.
It sounds great on paper, and as someone who regularly records music at home, the potential time saved is huge. So, let’s load it up and see what happens.
Upon first opening BIAS X, I am presented with a self-explanatory drag-and-drop workflow. It’s one that anyone who has used amplifier modeling software before will be familiar with and presents opportunities to keep it simple or dive into the deeper functions with a few clicks.
Amps, cabs, and effects are displayed on the left of the screen as part of a visual and modern interface via stylish images that correlate to the sound the model is based on.
The cab models come complete with four different mic selections that can be mixed and positioned to taste with level controls and the aforementioned drag and drop. Additionally, if you have a preferred IR, like many of us rightfully fussy guitar players do, that can be loaded in here, too.
And, as one might expect, there’s a healthy serving of curated presets to get you started.
So, I could simply treat BIAS X like I would a traditional modeling plugin and build the tone from scratch myself, but that’s not my aim here. I’m looking to save time and let the AI do the work.
With this in mind, load up a hard rock, blues-inspired project (think somewhere between Philip Sayce and Phil X) that needs some guitar, pick up my Fender Telecaster, and use the text to tone functionality to ask the AI for a “smooth, driven hard rock tone.” To most, this should indicate a fairly gained up Marshall with plenty of mid-range and a bite that is present but not offensive.
Astonishingly, after a few short moments, BIAS X nails it. It loads up a Marshall-style amp model that's receiving a good kick from a Klon-type overdrive, and a little reverb to add some space.
I’m surprised, as I was expecting to do some tweaking, particularly as my instruction was purposefully general. BIAS X seems to have understood the connotations of the genre and delivered accordingly, leaving me free to go ahead and hit record.
Next, I need to do a bit of double tracking. BIAS X conveniently allows presets to be saved and organised into folders within the software, so I do that and load the plug-in into a separate track. Bringing up the same sound, I ask the AI to tweak it to a darker version with less gain.
The software adds an EQ, which darkens things up as requested, but it did not reduce the gain to the level that I wanted. Helpfully, the AI gives a detailed explanation of how it arrives at the presets it creates. Reading through this, I see it considers the amp to be running in a low-gain mode and that it made changes to the Klon-style pedal model to reduce the gain.
The only thing I did outside of prompting the AI was turn a volume knob - the AI did the rest
Utilising this as a bit of direction, I dive into the pedal controls and back off the volume knob, which turns out to be the change that does the trick. This lowered gain seems to highlight a bit of fizz. Given that there are a number of places this could be tweaked at - the drive pedal, amp, and EQ - I go back and ask the AI to do this for me.
Telling me that it utilised those three things, BIAS X now presents a tone that is a darker, lower-gain version of the first. Exactly what I was chasing. After recording a double track, I now have a big and impactful hard rock sound utilising two different versions of a new preset, and the only thing I did outside of prompting the AI was turn that volume knob on the overdrive pedal - the AI did the rest.
I have a similar experience when using the same method to prompt an “epic, hard rock, lead tone”. This time, it gives me a Mesa-style amp, boosted with a Tube Screamer-inspired pedal and some delay. I ask it to increase the delay level and sync it to my DAW’s tempo track, which it does without any issues, resulting in a saturated and huge-sounding lead. Admittedly, I spend a lot of time here indulging my over-the-top rock licks and just having fun.
And it’s the same story with my next request - a “creepy ethereal clean”. Out of this, I am hoping for a reverb-soaked clean with some eerie modulation. Initially, it’s all a bit on the thin side, courtesy of the Crystal Jazz amp model, and a reverb that’s gone a little too far, but it does have a modulation that is indeed ‘creepy’ like I asked. So, I tell the BIAS X to reduce the reverb and fatten things up a bit, which it duly does resulting in the eerie ambiance I was hoping for.
Four sounds, very little effort, a lot of time saved, and music successfully recorded with the tones I had in mind. Mission accomplished.
Before finishing up, I want to try out the ‘music to tone’ function. Potentially perfect for recording covers, I opt for recreating the lead tone in The Kinks - Waterloo Sunset. The process is as simple as attaching the song file to the AI chat box. BIAS X takes a moment to analyse it, asks for the timestamp location of the tone to be copied, and then presents four varying options.
The first three don’t quite have that mid-range honk, but the fourth gets it pretty much spot on via some compression, the Ecstasy 100 amp model, an EQ, and a little reverb. The only thing it’s missing is a slapback delay to create that doubling effect in the song. As you will have gathered by now, it’s just a case of asking the AI to do this, and it’s happy to oblige.
All of this is quite a surreal experience. Having spent hundreds of hours tweaking guitar tones, it's a little strange to suddenly have BIAS X doing the heavy lifting, and doing it well. The exciting thing is that, being an ‘agentic’ AI, BIAS X is only going to get better.
There are, of course, people who enjoy the process of obsessively tweaking a guitar sound, and rightfully so. I myself am one of them. If you are too, then there is plenty here to get stuck into, just like a normal plugin. In this case, the AI can act as a helpful and convenient starting point.
And it’s not like the software just mindlessly does it for you either. It gives a detailed explanation of the steps it has taken in a way that could be educational for beginners, and even the experienced may learn a few tricks.
Anything that helps streamline a workflow reduces the barriers from thought to creation. The way BIAS X facilitates the quick production of record-ready sounds is therefore endlessly valuable, and to many, it will be genuinely inspiring.
Try it for yourself www.positivegrid.com/pages/bias-x
