What do electric guitars have to do with colour correction?

Electric guitars and colour correction

Well, nothing really. But some of the tech used to coax new sounds from electric guitars is similar to some types of video production techniques. It's worth taking an "out of the box" look at how the two compare. Oh, and there's some great guitar playing as well

These days, its very unusual to take the unprocessed video from a camera and use it without any modification. In any serious production, there's now normally at least a nod towards colour grading.

People are getting more and more demanding when they're watching video productions. They expect it to look like film, and they want any CGI or special effects to blend-in so that they don't stick out or look like they were computer generated.

Mostly, this work is done by a computer. You can add colour grading and colour correction, as well as adding camera-shake, distance fogging, blur and a myriad of other adjustments. They're all designed to make everything shimmer and stand out, are added with increasing ease as processing gets simultaneously cheaper and cleverer.

Here's a processor that does just that for a completely different but analogous use: changing the characteristics of an electric guitar.

Electric guitars

Guitar amps have been around for ages. They all have their signature sound. Now, with the Kemper Profiler Amp, these famous amplifiers have been captured or, in a sense, "sampled" and can be recalled at will, ready to be used, live. And then, on top of these sound "models", the Amp adds reverb and all sorts of other processing that makes the sound sparkle.

It's a bit like building a CGI model (of a dinosaur, say) and blending it in with a real background. Couple all of this with some genius playing, and you have something remarkable.

The first 1m 22s of this video show the processed sound in isolation. At 1m 23s, there's a truly great performance.

The guitarist is Erlend Krauser. Thanks to Thomas Wendt for showing this to us.

And if you're more into colour correction than guitars - here's a really great tutorial