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 MIC'D page you press Listen to 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.
This is the real Magic Bronze interface running in your browser, just without sound: move the faders, open the pages, browse the presets. The tour is the same one that runs the first time you open the plugin.
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 MIC'D page, press Listen to my guitar in the My guitar panel 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.
MIC'D page → My guitar → Listen to my guitar.
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 in the voice list on the MIC'D page.
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 button, in the My guitar panel.
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 four 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
Captured from Thiago Hoover's guitar, a Stanford Retro DJ with an LR Baggs M1 soundhole magnetic pickup, recorded on the line and on a mic at the same time with our capture kit. A magnetic pickup hears the strings, not the top, so if your guitar has one, this is the first voice to try. It arrived in version 0.12, free for everyone who already owns it.
In the selector: RETRO MAG
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 work on the pickup: Source set to DI, or the line side in Stereo Mode. With the Source on the mic, MIC'D rests, because the mic already hears a real guitar. And the Your IRs bank stays open: drop a WAV in the folder and it shows up on the MIC'D page, leveled to the same perceived loudness as the factory voices.
Taylor, Big Baby, Ibanez, Martin, AKG, API, Stanford, LR Baggs, 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, aligns the timing and fixes the polarity. After that the window shows what is in force and lets you trim the line gain in 0.1 dB steps and try the polarity by ear.
Pan, level and solo for each side on the MIC'D page. You solo the mic, solo the line, hear what each one brings and balance it by ear. While a solo is on, a tab at the top of the window says so, so you never export it by accident.
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.
Presets cover ~90% of cases. The other 10%: learning YOUR room's noise, comparing two versions of the sound on A/B, letting AUTO match the volume. All one click away, in the same plugin.
Click Learn and stay silent for about two seconds: the plugin stores the fingerprint of your room's noise (fan, air conditioning, preamp hiss) and cleans deeper, with fewer side effects. It works even with NOISE at zero, so you learn first and raise the fader after.
Learn button, under the NOISE fader.
Got a sound you like? It sits on A. Click B, change whatever you want, from a fader to the reverb, and switch between them while you play. The guitar and your gear stay the same on both sides, so what you compare is the mix. And every effect icon is still the on/off switch for its module.
A and B buttons in the header, next to Bypass.
AUTO matches the processed level to the dry signal. If you moved a fader and it got better, it really got better, not just louder. It's the kind of honesty plugins almost never have.
AUTO button, under OUTPUT. The A key toggles it.
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 Listen again, play about twenty seconds and the star updates to the guitar in your hands right now.
MIC'D page → My guitar → Listen again.
Each fader does one specific, musical job, tuned by Chrys for steel strings: bronze shimmer, pick attack and piezo quack ask for a different calibration. No endless menu: decisions you can hear, read left to right in the same order the sound flows.
A pickup hears the strings, but not the wood or the air on the way to a microphone. MIC'D runs the line through a real steel-string guitar captured in the studio with a mic: pick the voice, BABY DR, MOD AUD, DREAD or RETRO MAG, and hold the PICKUP / MIC'D button to hear the difference. KEEP ATTACK brings the pick attack back on top.
Parallel compression: a fast FET catches the pick peaks, a slow OPTO levels the groove, and the result goes in under your dry guitar. Your strum stays yours. Press SAMPLE, play for about ten seconds and it fits itself to your hand.
RESONANT lifts the guitar right where the body resonates, around 100 Hz, and clears a little of the boxiness just above. DENSITY backs off when the low open string booms and lets go when it passes, and you watch it happen live on the page.
The EXCITER listens to the shimmer of the bronze strings and adds a soft layer of air up top, without raising hiss or pick noise. SMART brings clarity forward in quiet passages and stays out of the way when you dig in.
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.
NOISE lowers the hiss in the gaps and under the notes, without cutting their tails. LO (about 11 ms) for playing along, HQ for mixing. Next to it, HUM removes mains hum at 50 or 60 Hz.
Blends the finished sound with your guitar as it arrives. Around 80% the style stays and your strum comes back underneath. The MASTER window opens the safety limiter and the six-band MASTER EQ.
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 window under it and the full technical control appears, with the same fader at the top of the page. On the dynamics pages YOUR signal draws the graph in real time; on BODY and SPARKLE, a line shows DENSITY and SMART working while you play; on the delay, a rhythmic timeline. You learn by mixing, on the groove you're recording right now.
The POWER page shows both stages, draws your level live and lets you drag the THRESHOLD right on the screen. SAMPLE listens to ten seconds of your groove and sets both. A gain-reduction meter with the ideal zone marked, a tip on every knob and a GUIDE ME that walks you step by step, checking against your audio.
Every module has one: BODY with DENSITY live, SPARKLE with SMART, delay with a timeline, master with a draggable ceiling.
The window under each fader cycles fixed styles: Gentle, Magic and Tight on POWER, Tight, Magic and Round on BODY, note values on DELAY. Magic is the setting Chrys calibrated for steel; when you fine-tune on the second page, it becomes Custom. The same styles sit at the top of each page, one click away.
The little arrows on the window change the style without opening anything.
SOURCE, INPUT, MIC'D and POWER describe you: your guitar, your room, your hand. You set them once and every preset plays through that setup, so browsing styles never undoes the work you did on your guitar.
The first four controls of the window, left to right.
On first launch, a guided tour walks the window in the right order. After that, pick in hand: the arrow keys change presets from anywhere in the plugin, B toggles bypass, A toggles AUTO. And the MIC, DI or STEREO tag before the preset name shows which bank you're in.
To see the tour again, click the Gringo Audio logo and choose Run the tour again.
Every home studio has a noise floor: a fan, air conditioning, preamp hiss with the gain up high, pickup hum. The mic and the line capture all of it along with the guitar. NOISE lowers that floor in the gaps and cleans under the notes without cutting their tails, and HUM removes mains hum. And it's a setting for your gear, not for the song: no factory preset touches it.
Memorizes the fingerprint of YOUR room's noise in 2 seconds of silence, even with NOISE at zero, and saves it with the session.
The hiss goes down while you play, frequency by frequency, and the notes stay whole from attack to tail.
Between phrases the noise drops a lot and stays low and steady, without a gate opening and closing.
Cable and mains hum comes out with very narrow cuts at 50 or 60 Hz. The lows keep their weight.
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 studio-captured voices, CROSSOVER and CLASSICAL, that the plugin tailors to your guitar. And the two together cost $29 in the suite.
