The Workshop
I'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. Along the way, it has also opened up some fascinating ways of thinking about tone. Analyzing individual amp snapshots, for example, can reveal how closely very different amplifiers can sometimes be made to resemble one another, an insight that is harder to see when thinking only in terms of conventional parametric controls.
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. The videos are on my own channel, my name is all over this page, and the same musical instincts run through both. The distinction is about what the work is trying to do.
My artist pages are where I make things because I want them to exist. The process itself is part of the point. 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.
Much of what I build is free. I also make premium NAM packs and welcome support from people who value the work, and I'm deeply grateful when people choose to support the time and effort that goes into it. Those things can live comfortably alongside the larger purpose. Conversant Soundworks is a workshop for musicians, and giving it a name of its own gives that work a home that can continue to grow around that purpose.
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. But 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.
RigSuite's job ends where your taste begins.
That idea also reaches beyond tone. RigSuite is only the workshop's starting point. The tools I'm building next move into the fretboard itself: shapes, harmony, visualization, and some of the ideas about how music fits together that took me years to work out, made easier to see, hear, and explore.
The through-line is helping players better understand what they already have, what they are already doing, and where they might take it next.
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, and the MIDI pedalboard, 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.
I also want to be transparent about how the software gets 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. That means everything from what belongs in the signal chain and how a control should respond to 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.
For me, the distinction comes down to what I value in the process. 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. The technology and its implications are changing quickly, and my thinking may evolve with them, but the principle underneath Conversant Soundworks is much more stable: build useful things, be clear about how they were made, give credit where it belongs, and keep the musician at the center.
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 (8K+ subscribers), the Facebook page (3.5K followers), and my music on Bandcamp.
