Mobile Guitar Modelling System
How to Set Up Artisans 3D Pedalboard
Artisans 3D Pedalboard is a professional guitar signal chain platform. This guide covers how to connect your guitar, what hardware you need, and how to get the most out of the app from day one.
What You Need
Your guitar produces a high-impedance instrument-level signal. A passive phone dongle cannot handle this correctly — it lacks the input stage needed for a guitar pickup. You need a USB Audio Class 1 compliant interface with a proper instrument input.
The good news is that most dedicated guitar interfaces, compact USB-C guitar dongles, and wireless guitar receivers qualify. If your interface is UAC1 compliant, it connects to iPhone automatically with no drivers and no configuration. Plug in and the app sees it.
What We Use
Our own test setup is a generic wireless guitar receiver (MB66 Audio Transmission System) used as a buffer, feeding into an Audio-Technica ATR2x-USB-C. The wireless receiver handles the guitar input stage correctly, and the ATR2x-USB-C is a compact, reliable USB-C dongle that works cleanly with iPhone. It is not an expensive setup — it just needs to be the right kind of hardware.
Any interface with a proper instrument input that presents as USB Audio Class 1 will work the same way.
Building Your First Chain
When you open the app, start with a simple chain — input, one or two effects, output. Get sound happening first. Once you have signal running through, you can add amp simulation, load a cabinet, and start stacking effects.
Drag pedals to reorder them. The signal flows left to right through the chain exactly as you build it. Tap any pedal to open its controls. Every knob updates in real time — there is no apply button, no latency on parameter changes.
Amp and Cabinet Together
For a complete amp rig, place your amp simulation before your cabinet. The amp shapes the tone and drive character. The cabinet colors the final sound the way a physical speaker and microphone would. Running amp without cab gives you a direct, uncolored amp tone. Running cab without amp applies cabinet coloring to whatever is before it in the chain — useful for processing audio files or blending with other effects.
The Mix control on the cabinet lets you blend dry and wet signal. At 100% you get full cabinet coloring. Dialing it back lets the direct signal breathe through.
Stereo Effects and Mono Inputs
If your interface is single-channel — which most compact guitar interfaces are — the app upmixes your signal to stereo cleanly at the input stage. From that point the chain runs fully stereo. Effects like chorus, reverb, and rotary speaker produce genuine stereo output, not a mono effect panned wide. Use headphones or a stereo output to hear the full result.
Force-mono mode is available in settings if you are running into a mono PA or recording a single channel.
Saving and Recalling Rigs
Once you have a chain dialed in, save it with a name. Saved chains appear on the main screen with a color-coded pedal map showing what is in the chain at a glance. Tap to load. The entire rig — every pedal, every setting — is recalled instantly.
Seven chains are included out of the box to give you starting points across different styles. Open any of them, modify freely, and save under a new name.