High-pitched ringing from Acoustic Simulator?

    I've started to notice a high-pitched tone while using the Acoustic Simulator with a compressor in front. I've tried it with different guitars and different cables. It's especially noticeable with active humbuckers (Seymour Duncan Blackouts in two different guitars) at settings I would otherwise love to use for recording. I can clearly hear it with my Strat as well, but only when I turn up the compressor and the Sparkle parameter in the Acoustic Sim higher than I would normally do.


    Here's an audio example. It's already noticeable during the broken chords at the beginning, but it gets louder as I play more softly. When I mute a note, however, the ringing is also muted. Is this a tone that is already present in the output of my guitars, gets boosted by the compressor and somehow excites the Acoustic Simulator? Or some kind of artifact from the Bronze and Sparkle parameters?


    Compressor in slot A

    Acoustic Simulator in slot X

    Pickup 2.0

    Body <0.0>

    Bronze +2.5

    Sparkle +2.4



    I'm seeing two peaks, around 8.65 and 17.3 kHz. When I use the Studio Equalizer to attenuate precisely those two frequencies (max Q, gain at -18dB), the ringing virtually disappears. Anyone else getting this?


    Edit: On reflection, I suppose "hiss" isn't the right word, as it suggests diffuse, high-frequency white noise. Some of that is present, too, but it isn't as intrusive. The sound I'm referring to here is a focused, sustained, pitched tone.

    The Acoustic Sim was always noisy for me, and still is. With single coils it's way worse. You can use a noise gate in front which totally kills the subtleties in tone, pick attack, and sustain or lower the mix percentage, but I still get this static popping.

    Larry Mar @ Lonegun Studios. Neither one famous yet.

    Like 1

    It's not your guitars. It's the stomp. When I use the Sim in a full mix then the noise and pops pretty much disappear. The aggravation happens when you are trying to play a nice intro before the bass and drums kick in.

    Larry Mar @ Lonegun Studios. Neither one famous yet.

    For reference, here's the exact same clip from my first post, but with a notch EQ at 8.7 kHz (and at 17.4, although that one probably doesn't make much of a difference to most of us). If you go back and forth between both, the ringing is very obvious in the first one.


    pasted-from-clipboard.png  pasted-from-clipboard.png


    With this EQ, it sounds great and perfectly usable to me. Like I mentioned, I can use the Kemper's Studio Equalizer to do more or less the same thing, but then I'm using up an additional slot just to correct the Acoustic Sim.


    To be honest, apart from this ringing, I'm not having any issues with the Acoustic Sim (forgot to mention I'm using it with the amp section turned off). It's hyper sensitive, though, with a lot of high-frequency content that makes it sound alive, so I can imagine any single coil hum or electrical noise would be greatly amplified. I'm lucky to have a pretty electromagnetically quiet room, I guess: my Strat generally behaves very nicely.