The WorkshopI'm a guitarist and artist first.
Conversant Soundworks is one person at a bench, me, and RigSuite started the way most things here do: with a sound I was chasing. A lot of my life in music has been that chase: shaping tones, comparing gear, building signal chains, capturing sounds, and listening closely enough to understand why one combination makes me want to play and another doesn't. Over time, I accumulated a large library of neural amp models, cabinet responses, reverbs, and other tools I genuinely cared about.
I also found myself spending more and more time searching, comparing, organizing, and rebuilding instead of playing, often with the familiar feeling that acquiring more might somehow lead to playing more. I wanted a better way to understand what I already had, navigate it, and shape it into something personal. RigSuite grew out of that. What began as a solution for my own rig has now helped thousands of players make more of what they already have, and along the way it opened up some fascinating ways of thinking about tone.
That mix of practical usefulness and musical curiosity is really what Conversant Soundworks is for. It has a separate name from my artist work on purpose, although there is no attempt to separate it from me. My artist pages are where I make things because I want them to exist. Conversant Soundworks is the part of my practice that turns outward, where I take things I have learned, built, or wished existed and shape them into tools that might be useful to other players. I want the work here to stand on whether it helps: whether it saves time, clarifies something, opens up a new possibility, or simply gets someone back to playing.
The philosophy behind RigSuite is simple. A rig is a tool. The models, cabinets, reverbs, analysis, and utilities are all tools. The player stays at the center. Neural amp modeling is extraordinary technology, and open-source work has made it possible for one person to build things that once might have required a team. The technology matters most to me when it removes friction without taking away the decisions that give playing its identity: what you like, what sounds like you, and how you want to get there.
How the software is made
I'm a musician first and foremost, with a day job and a family. I use modern AI-assisted tools for some of the more complex software engineering because I was determined to solve these problems and my own coding ability was not at a level where I could have built all of this alone.
What I bring is the idea, the musical judgment, the product design, the testing, the iteration, and hundreds of hours spent deciding how the thing should actually work: what belongs in the signal chain, how a control should respond, how features interact, what the interface says, and what is worth building at all. The design, musical, and product decisions are mine, and I remain responsible for everything I release.
I know AI-assisted development is a sensitive subject for some people, so I would rather be straightforward about it. The software tools I build this way are intended to remain free and oriented toward public usefulness. Premium sound libraries and optional support help sustain the broader work without putting the core tools behind a paywall.
People sometimes ask how that squares with my feelings about AI in music. With my own music, the process is inseparable from the result. The uncertainty, failed ideas, playing, listening, revision, and long way around are where the songs come from, and I have no desire to outsource that. With a utility, usefulness is the point. I care whether it solves the problem well and whether it leaves the person using it with more room to create something of their own. That's where I currently draw the line, and the principle underneath Conversant Soundworks is more stable than the technology: build useful things, be clear about how they were made, give credit where it belongs, and keep the musician at the center.
The open-source foundation
None of this would exist without Steve Atkinson's Neural Amp Modeler, which he shared openly, or without the wider open-source community whose work I rely on. RigSculpt began as my adaptation of his plug-in. RigSculpt Workshop grew from wanting a practical way to navigate a large library of models.
Everything built around that foundation, including pickup voicing, drive, compression, modulation, delay, five reverb engines, output EQ, stereo dual-rig operation, the library tools, Synergize, the MIDI pedalboard, and now ARTIFICER and FLEX, was developed here for RigSuite. It has become a substantial body of work, and I'm proud of what I've built while wanting to remain equally clear about the foundation that made it possible.
Everything here comes out of an actual working musical practice, from the records and videos to a rig that has to hold up when I sit down and play. You can find that work on the YouTube channel, the Facebook page, and my music on Bandcamp.
