Emulating the tones of iconic guitars is not exactly new, we've seen a number of amps, instruments and apps giving players access to legendary sounds without having to swap guitars. Italy's Sim1 is aiming to stand out from the crowd by not only cramming classic tones into a floor stomp, but doing so without any sampling or MIDI help. The XT-1 has a dozen classic tone clones cooked in, and more available via a companion app.
"There's nothing in the market with such a qualitative sound, which is the result of years of research," said Sim1. The XT-1 floor pedal's noted guitar pre-loads include a Gibson 335 for those BB King moments, a PRS Santana and a 1964 Fender Telecaster, with three pickup tones available from most of the 12 guitar simulations on offer.
The company stresses that the guitar sounds offered are not sampled, nor are they MIDI – so there's no need to install additional hardware such as hex pickups. Instead the tones come courtesy of something it's calling Smart Tone Shaping. Sim1 isn't revealing exactly how its technology works, but is promising realistic, zero lag Musicman, Fender, Gibson, Martin, Benedetto or PRS tones in 48 or 96 kHz resolution out of the box.
After cabling up a guitar to the XT-1, a player runs through a six note per string scale supplied by the company and this allows the stomp to learn the pickup characteristics of the instrument. Then the output tone is modified by the stomp to sound just like the iconic guitar selected.
The XT-1 offers true bypass for complete removal from the signal chain at the push of a switch, it has a pedalboard-friendly 9 V DC power requirement and rocks a USB port for adding purchased guitar sounds, backing up settings and tweaking user preferences.
Connecting an iOS/Android companion app over Wi-Fi will allow the guitarist to dig deeper by purchasing tones developed by Sim1, share or download XT-1 user tones for free, transfer tones from the app to the pedal and change the order of available tones on the stomp.
The XT-1 guitar simulator made its debut earlier in the year at Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Germany, and is now set to make an appearance at the NAMM show next month in Anaheim, California. No pricing or release information has been made available, but you can see what's on offer in the video below.
Source: Sim1