Neural Amp Modeler NAM turns my humbucker into split ! Introducing NPM Neural Pickup Modeler

Hey everyone! So, here it is: I’ve been using NAM—Neural Amp Modeler—a lot, and I find it’s pretty powerful. And since it’s open-source, you can really have a lot of fun with it and go way beyond the basic concept. Essentially, it’s kind of like having an open-source version of something like a Kemper or a ToneX, but it uses Google DeepMind’s Wavenet technology.
Basically, someone had the idea to take that and train it on amps, and that’s how NAM came to be. It’s an open-source project, and I really recommend you check it out.
Now, for my own experiment over the past few days, the idea was pretty straightforward: I wanted to clone a guitar pickup and set myself a simple initial goal: transforming a humbucker into a single coil. I wanted to be able to do quick A/B tests easily, so I made a NAM model that turns my humbucker into a split coil.
For example, on my Kramer Baretta, which has a Seymour Duncan SH-4 pickup—technically it should be a TB-4 for the tremolo version, but never mind—the pickup can be split just like a real single coil. So the final sound is genuinely like a Strat-style single coil.
As for the process, it goes like this: first, I record my humbucker with a very short sine sweep. I just took a little sine sweep from the classic NAM test input. (By the way, at some point I figured out how to use super short sine sweeps to help the model recognize and avoid aliasing, which got me kicked out of the NAM Facebook group—but that’s another story about a very silly moderator.)
Anyway, I play the sine sweeps through a little Bluetooth speaker placed right up to the humbucker. Then I do the same with the pickup in split-coil mode. I record both the "dry" humbucker signal and the "wet" split-coil signal into ToneZone, train the model, and now I’ve got a NAM that turns my humbucker into a single coil virtually.
In practice, that means I can keep the pickup in humbucker mode and just use the NAM plugin to get the single-coil sound without physically splitting it. My audio chain is just my guitar, the humbucker, then the NAM plugin, and then ToneX. Personally, I prefer ToneX for the amp modeling—maybe because it uses LSTM instead of Wavenet, or maybe just because it has lower latency and better compression.
So in the end, you can do a pretty decent A/B test. It’s not perfect because my hand never returns to exactly the same position each time I switch, but from my perspective, it sounds really similar between the humbucker-plus-NAM and the actual split humbucker.
the model : www.tone3000.com/tones/pickup-modeling-experiment-46772