Steel-string guitar at home almost always ends up as a line straight from the piezo, because putting up a mic takes time and a quiet room you don't have. And the piezo hands you that thin, nasal, plastic sound. So on the BODY page you press MY GUITAR: you play for about twenty seconds, it learns how YOUR guitar sounds on the line, marks the captured voice closest to your sound with a star, and FIT tailors that voice to your instrument. Put that together with NOISE, which learns your room's noise in ~2 seconds, and with the MAGICOM reverb: that is Magic Bronze, your guitar sounding like a studio, now.
The mistake I see a lot of people make is running down the body list, trying one at a time, by ear, until they give up and settle for the first one. Here the path is different: you play, it measures, and the choice comes ready.
You open the BODY page, press MY GUITAR and play the way you play: strumming, fingerpicking, whatever you usually record. In about twenty seconds the plugin builds a profile of how your guitar and your pickup sound together. Use whatever guitar you have there: the profile belongs to YOUR instrument.
BODY page → MY GUITAR button.
With the profile ready, it compares your sound with every captured voice and marks the closest one with a star. One click and you are on the body closest to your instrument, so you don't start from a guess.
The ★ shows up right in the voice selector.
Turn FIT on and the chosen voice adjusts to your pickup's profile: a gentle, bounded correction, computed from your own profile, with honest volume. In our measurements it closes about a third of the timbre difference between different guitars. The rest is your instrument's character, and it stays.
FIT pill next to the voice selector.
Until now, if you wanted a device listening to your own guitar, you bought dedicated hardware in the 300 to 450 dollar range, a ToneDexter, a Fishman Aura, and trained it with your own instrument. Here that job lives on one page of the plugin that already handles the rest of your chain. And the profile is saved with the session: changed strings or setup, press MY GUITAR again, play about twenty seconds and move on.
Find your sound
Banks by style: Sertanejo, Worship, Pop/Ballad, Folk, Country, Acoustic Rock, MPB, Voice & Guitar, Fingerstyle and Stage, plus Essentials and the captured voices in the Guitars bank. The style presets carry the fine-tuning an engineer would dial, from the compressor to the delay figure. Inside each bank the DI sounds come first and the mic ones after, so you cycle fast with the arrow keys, browser closed. Try it. In stereo mode a dedicated bank comes in, recalibrated preset by preset for the mic and line pair.
Interactive mockup. Filters, search, favorites and recent all work with the same logic that ships in the plugin.
Body libraries are easy to inflate: dozens of files pulled from around the internet, each with a room baked in and a different volume, so you switch bodies and what changes is the gain. We went the other way: we captured every voice with our own measurement process, one guitar chosen per body style, only the body of the instrument, because the space lives in MAGICOM. And we level-matched everything by perceived loudness, so switching voices changes the guitar, never the volume, and your ear compares timbre on equal footing. There are three voices today, with the next ones already showing in the selector, and the MY GUITAR star marks the one closest to your guitar.
Captured from a Taylor Big Baby BBTe: dread shape in a leaner body, firm lows, present mids, the sound of the working folk guitar. It is the default voice: open the plugin and it is already waiting for you.
In the selector: BABY DR
Captured from an Ibanez AAM70CE, an auditorium of contemporary build: balanced mids, separated notes, a body that sits in the mix close to the voice. The pick for pop, for worship, and for anyone singing over their own guitar.
In the selector: MOD AUD
Captured from a Martin DCX1E through an AKG C414 into an API preamp, a classic studio chain for steel-string guitar. Big body, deep lows, the band bed of folk, country, and roots sertanejo.
In the selector: DREAD
GRAND AUD, JUMBO and PARLOR already show in the selector, dimmed, waiting for the right guitar to pass through the studio. The library grows with every captured guitar.
The previous library was retired: it did not pass our new capture standard, so we went with few voices, all verified, instead of a long list. Your old sessions and presets automatically land on the new voice of the same guitar family, so none of your projects opens silent.
The voices apply in DI mode; in Mic mode, BODY becomes a warm low shelf. And the Your IRs bank stays open: drop a WAV in the folder and it shows up on the BODY page, leveled to the same perceived loudness as the factory voices.
Taylor, Big Baby, Ibanez, Martin, AKG, API, ToneDexter and Fishman Aura are trademarks of their respective owners, mentioned here only to identify the instruments and equipment captured or compared. No affiliation or endorsement is implied.
When you record a steel-string with mic and line together, the usual move is picking one in the mix and muting the other. Each one hears half the instrument though: the mic brings the wood and the air of the room, the line brings the shine of the bronze and the pick attack. On the acoustic records that sound huge, both are playing, one on each side of the image. ST mode does that right here: mic on the left, line on the right, each side with the treatment it asks for, and the pair becomes one guitar, big the way you hear it on records.
You play for four seconds and the plugin matches the line to the mic, time-aligns the pair and fixes polarity. The image sits centered and stays mono-safe. Dialing that by hand usually eats a studio afternoon.
Pan, level and solo for each side on the BODY page. You solo the mic, solo the line, hear what each one brings and balance it by ear, not by guessing.
Got two microphones? Click the R pill and the pair becomes a true-stereo mic rig, with mic voicing on both sides. One mic and one line work too, use whatever you have around.
A whole bank calibrated for this mode, style by style. The browser shows the right bank for the mode you are in.
ST mode asks for an interface with two inputs, the same one you already use when you record mic and line. We went looking for another guitar plugin that does this complete pair, with per-side voicing and automatic setup, and we did not find one.
This is a mockup of the plugin: try the buttons, roll the body and space selectors, run LEARN. Icons are per-effect bypasses; faders light up as you push each effect. Mixing becomes a sonic, tactile process, simple and fun.
Presets cover ~90% of the cases. The other 10%: learning YOUR room's noise, bypassing one effect, letting AUTO match the volume. All one click away, in the same plugin.
Click LEARN and stay silent for ~2 seconds: the plugin captures your room's noise fingerprint (fan, AC, cable hum) and cleans deeper with fewer side effects. One fader handles the rest.
Clean Up zone → LEARN pill under the Noise fader.
Every effect icon is a bypass button. Zone titles too: tap CREATIVE and the whole group goes silent at once. Useful to hear exactly what each piece does without undoing the preset.
Icons and zone labels are bypass switches.
The AUTO pill matches the processed level to the raw signal. If a fader move sounds better, it is actually better, not just louder. The kind of honesty plugins almost never have.
End Here zone → AUTO pill under Output.
Your guitar's profile is saved with the session, so it comes back when you reopen the project. New strings, new setup, another guitar in the same project: press MY GUITAR again, play about twenty seconds and the star updates to the guitar in your hands right now.
BODY page → MY GUITAR → Redo profile.
Each macro does one specific, musical job, tuned by Chrys for steel strings, bronze-string shimmer, pick attack and piezo quack ask for a different calibration. No endless menu: decisions you can hear.
A parallel compressor: it evens out the dynamics on a copy of your signal and blends it under your dry guitar. Your strumming stays yours, phrases stop sinking in the mix, and sustain shows up.
In DI, it blends your line signal with a captured real steel-string studio body, the plastic sound becomes wood. In Mic, it becomes a warm low shelf that gives a thin recording its chest back.
Lifts the zing of bronze strings and the air of the attack without turning brightness into pain. Strings changed yesterday, in the right dose.
Doubles your take with a 7-voice symmetric doubler and stretches the image with a mono-safe imager. The second page picks the voices: 1, 3, 5 or 7. Push it in the chorus for a wall of guitar; pull it back for the intimate verse.
A short, musical delay tuned to sit behind the guitar. A subtle throw at the end of phrases, never rhythmic clutter.
Authorial convolution reverb spaces in the selector, amount on the fader. From dry studio to cathedral, without opening another plugin. The full story right below.
Clears the low-mid buildup that makes home recordings murky and holds back the piezo's nasal quack. The guitar steps forward without getting thin.
Holds back harsh pick peaks and steel-string squeak. Works with SPARKLE: all the brightness you want, none of the sawtooth.
Gate and spectral reduction together. LO (~8 ms) to play and record while monitoring; HQ for maximum cleanup at mix time. With the LEARN button, it reads your room's noise in 2 seconds and cleans using your room's own fingerprint.
One click in the header and the tuner takes the screen: big, precise, reading the raw signal before any effect. Tune, close, record.
Almost every plugin reverb is an algorithm guessing how a room might sound. Convolution works from different raw material: an acoustic photograph of a real space. Your guitar starts sounding inside that space, with the exact character of the original. It is the most faithful reverb technology there is.
MAGICOM is our convolution engine, and its library is authorial: we captured every space in true stereo and kept, by ear, only what sits right on an acoustic guitar. There are families of spaces, each with a job: the dry wooden room for bossa, the frontal plate for percussive playing, the hall that holds your guitar in place with air around it, the vintage concrete chamber you hear on soul records, the dense steel plate for ballads. Generic bundle spaces do not get in. And each space carries its measured reverb time written into its name.
Click the reverb's name inside the plugin and the full editor opens: pre-delay, decay, filters, width and gain. And if you have your own IRs, load them right there. Every factory preset already comes with the space chosen for its style, you just decide how much.
Every fader hides a second page: click the style window under it and the full technical control appears. On the dynamics pages YOUR signal draws the graph in real time; on the delay, a rhythmic timeline; on the body, captures that keep your attack. You learn by mixing, on the groove you are recording right now.
The POWER page draws your level live and you drag the THRESHOLD right on the display, the way classic studio compressors work. A gain-reduction meter with the sweet zone marked, a tooltip on every knob, and a GUIDE ME that walks you through it, validating each step with your audio.
Every module has one: delay with a rhythmic timeline, body with captures, master with a draggable ceiling.
The style window under each fader cycles fixed styles: Gentle, Magic and Tight on the compressor, figures on the delay, strengths on tame. Magic is the setting Chrys calibrated for steel strings; the moment you fine-tune the second page, it becomes Custom. One click on the window opens the lesson.
The window arrows switch styles without opening anything.
On first open, a guided tour walks the zones in the right order, from noise to honest volume. After that, pick in hand: the arrow keys change presets from anywhere in the plugin, B toggles bypass, A toggles AUTO. Built for players who track alone.
To replay the tour, click the Gringo Audio logo and choose Run the tour again.
Every home studio has a noise floor: the fan, the AC, the pickup hum, the street outside the window. The microphone and the DI line pick up all of it along with the guitar. The Clean Up zone attacks that floor on two fronts, spectral reduction to pull the noise out from inside the sound and a gate to hold the silence between phrases. And that setting belongs to the room, not the song: once you calibrate NOISE, no preset ever touches it.
Memorizes the noise print of YOUR room in 2 seconds of silence.
The reduction pulls noise out from inside the sound, frequency by frequency, and the notes stay.
Between one phrase and the next, it holds absolute silence. No hiss creeping up when you stop playing.
Built for constant noise: fan, street, AC, the neighbor through the wall. That covers about 90% of home recording cases.
One click on TUNER in the header and the tuner takes over the page: giant note, cent readout, frequency in Hz. It listens to the raw signal before any effect, so what you tune is exactly what the recording receives. Tune, go back to the faders, record.
Music producer, educator, plugin developer and Full Sail University ambassador, a reference for 290k+ creators learning to make better music from home studios, not million-dollar rooms.
When I launched Magic Nylon, one question kept coming back: what about my steel-string? Everyone recording at home owns a steel acoustic with a piezo, and the line sound stays thin, nasal, with no wood in it.
Magic Bronze is the same philosophy with a different calibration: captured bodies of steel-string studio guitars, presets from worship to country, and the MAGICOM on reverb. Hit play and the guitar comes out finished.
— Chrys Gringo
After years helping creators rescue thin, muddy or noise-drowned guitar recordings, the process stays simple:
No EQ curves. No endless tutorial hole. No subscription trap. A complete guitar chain you buy once for a fair price, own forever, and reach for every time your guitar needs to sound finished.
VST3 / AU / AAX. Installs alongside your DAW in under a minute. Buy once, own forever.
Magic Nylon + Magic Bronze for $14.50 per plugin
No subscription. Buy once, it's yours forever.
Mac & Windows · VST3 · AU · AAX · Works with Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One.
Magic Bronze by Gringo Audio — a Chrys Gringo project. Made in the United States.
Magic Nylon is the world's first plugin dedicated to nylon-string guitar: bossa, MPB, worship, classical and flamenco, with guitar bodies captured in the studio including a flamenco guitar from Córdoba and a Spanish concert instrument. And the two together cost $29 in the suite.