Positive Grid might just have done for the guitar plugin what its Spark amp did for the desktop amp by unveiling an AI-powered tone platform that allows you to design your electric guitar tone by text prompt.
The suite is called Project: BIAS X, and Positive Grid has described it as a “paradigm shift” for in-the-box tone solutions.
“For decades, creating new tones meant navigating through layers of gear, menus, and manual tweaks,” says Positive Grid. “Now, musicians can just say what they want. Powered by agentic AI that understands tone like a musician, BIAS X transforms user input into high-quality sounds fast – making tone creation feel less like trial and error, and more like inspiration.”
Simply type in your prompt and it will make you a tone. Then you can refine if needs be, asking for more compression, or a more drive... or maybe to take some of that chorus off because it is not 1986 anymore.
But you don’t even need text. Say you want to nail the tone to a song you just heard, or one that has been eluding you for years and is driving you nuts (hello, David Gilmour fans, come on down…) you could ask the BIAS X to engineer the tone from the music or an isolated guitar track.
You can also lean fully into the digital present and give it some blue-sky “creative” prompts and see what happens. “Try prompts like ‘sunset over Saturn’ and hear them come to life,” suggests Positive Grid.
We imagine similar conversations went down in studio control rooms throughout the ‘60s. Now we’re having those conversations with a computer program that has been trained on over a million different guitar tones. Is this progress? Positive Grid would argue in the affirmative.
“BIAS X understands the sound of every genre, era, and technique – so you can explore tone without limits,” it says.
BIAS X sure has a lot of carefully AI-engineered models of guitar amps to draw upon, with Positive Grid training its AI on over 200 models to present us with the BIAS X platform’s 33 amps.
These have been engineered with circuit-level detail, replicating the sag, compression and feel of a genuine tube amp.
And then you have the effects, 63 in total, plus the IR loader that allows you to blend and customise IRs, plus a collection of cab sims that was engineered in partnership with Spectre Digital, and the capacity to take any of these digital components and put them together to create custom rigs.
Indeed, you can create two entirely different signal chains and run them in parallel, blending them, panning them or layering them. BIAS FX gives you the drag-and-drop functionality, the streamlined user experience, but also the option to dive deeper and tweak.
It will be interesting how this accelerated front-end experience of dialling tones via text prompt works in concert with the desire to create something totally bespoke.
We as guitar players share the thrill of convenience and quick discovery but underneath that there is a more obsessive compulsion to assume a forensic level of control over our sound.
Perhaps these AI prompts take the heavy lifting out of creating draft tones – even tones that are good enough for practice or demos – but we still have the option to refine manually, or by further text prompts.
Positive Grid says “nearly-endless customisation” is on the menu, and the BIAS X user interface has been designed to take the pain out of the process – particularly useful when it comes to preset management. It's a tantalising prospect.
Priced $149, or at $99 if you are upgrading from the qualifying Positive Grid Spark and BIAS products, BIAS X is available now. See Positive Grid for more details.
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