Creating Guitar Effects with DSP

Source Audio's Chief Scientist Bob Chidlaw discusses the process of working with DSP (Digital Signal Processing) to create guitar and bass effects pedals. Bob talks about a variety of topics including his time at Kurzweil and MIT, the steps of creating an effects pedal, and the advantages/disadvantages of digital vs. analog technology.
For more info about Source Audio and our effects pedals visit www.sourceaudio.net/

[@bensinger6031]

Bob is a genius and everything you guys make is fantastic.

[@sourceaudioeffects]

Thanks for the positivity! Everybody at Source Audio is amazed by what Bob does.

[@qiuz51]

The people who came up in this industry as it matured are so legendary. Love to see the characters who create this tech talking about it in their own words. Thanks for this interview!

[@256k_]

Thank you very much for this! This was such a privilege to get a glimpse into the thoughts of someone in the industry for so long.

[@danieloux]

you are a audio genius sir! It’s really cool that you post stuff like this to learn a little bit about the behind the scenes source audio stuff!

[@TeeOuix]

Just wonderful, simply wonderful and absolutely fascinating to me being an ageing guitar playing, retired tech. What a lovely person Mr.Chidlaw comes across as. A clear, concise and very clever man, Mr.Chidlaw, I salute you Sir.

[@danielpirone8028]

Fantastic interview! More please!

[@SonnetGomes]

Wow...this is so informational and behind the scenes look into things we take for granted. So much hard work and dedication goes into this...who knew! Thank you so much for sharing this video.

[@silvertongues2]

brilliant, as someone who wants to get into DSP effects building this was great, lovely bloke too. Reminds me of many engineers I've worked with.

[@sassycat]

Thanks for sharing this, it's definitely food for thought.

[@RockandLap]

Love my Ventris and Nemesis. Top notch products. Now I have some context as to why they are so awesome.

[@alvarhanso6310]

Been using Source Audio pedals for 9 years and love them! Watching this gives me a deeper appreciation of how Bob Chidlaw and the whole team can go from dreaming up a pedal idea and then making it a reality. For weaving sonic tapestries, one needs the right materials, and Source Audio produces them!

[@blendudeboi]

Fantastic video

[@ActuallySettle]

I had no idea David Griesinger worked on reverb algorithms, but that makes sense given his later interests. His work is really interesting.

[@g-man7687]

Very interesting stuff I have a 5 gallon bucket full of analog effects some are great and I was very hesitant to make the jump to digital but after listening to Source Audio demos through headphones on my iPhone I was convinced to give them a try I started with a LA lady I really liked it and the versatility of it was like no other drive pedal that I owned so then I got a collider followed by a mercury Flanger then a spectrum intelligent filter they’re all everything they are advertised to be. could you get better sounding effects maybe but I don’t think so for the price point I doubt anybody blindfolded could tell the difference between the old analog effects versus these newer Digital effects at least my ears can’t tell the difference you guys are pioneers Keep up the great work !!! it can only get better

[@LoVeAmBiEnT]

Got the collider. Awesome pedal.

[@garyworsham9471]

Funny to hear about your obsession with the implementation of spring reverb on DSP. Me too!

[@elchuteloco]

thanks for the C4

[@ConsertandoTudo]

this guy knows his stuff.

[@orphanfrequencyyeah1742]

From the lion's mouth! Fascinating. Happy accidents are the sauce of designing/building new things, and indeed you have to be ready for them. I have a Ventris and consider it an Effects-Instrument instead of a pedal. Now I'm trying to make up my mind on the next SA pedal to get. May there be many new innovative "pedals" in the future. (Regarding the last minutes of the interview, somebody should give Bob and his team access to a supercomputer!)

[@auntjenifer7774]

This is really interesting and I wish we could really see what the numbers fo to sound !

[@rubenpartono]

Thanks so much for doing this talk! A decade ago I had dreams of programming guitar effects but I put those on pause since I had no idea where to look. Now I'm still not doing that, but am headed towards computer graphics/vision careers which sounds eerily similar after watching this video... Hope this can reach Bob 🙂 what a cool journey. So far, the DSP-based effects I've known process signals with only digital hardware. Is there any research work on analog computing hardware to program these effects on? I've heard some talk about _analog computers_ with analog primitives that are supposed to compute much faster than their digital emulation, for the cost of, well, being analog. (Heard this from Veritasium, the KZbin channel.) Perhaps this could offer immense speedups to purely digital processing while still benefiting from programmability. It'd be super cool if I get to hear what you think of this direction!

[@DoobTube71]

LOVE my new SA Spectrum intelligent filter. If only Jerry Garcia had lived to play the full Spectrum! Thank you, "DigiLog Man"! QUESTION: how is "breadboarding" and tone experimenting done with DSP programming? Does it resemble analog breadboarding at all (e.g., see Brian Wampler's instructional vids), but rather playing DI through a computer with various algorithm codes? I doubt it, but have no idea.

[@prettypointlessvideo]

Title: exactly what I'm looking for Man in thumbnail: looks like someone who knows about this stuff :) Looking forward to watching

[@TriPedalReviews]

WOOOT

[@raulacevedo-esteves9493]

He is an interesting person to have a chat over beers.

[@johncbeer]

Man I wish I could shadow you guys for a day.

[@SeabraGuitarWorks]

It is great to see a young woman that is really into prog music. Great music will never die

[@Calvertronics]

I reckon Bob is a better advertisement than your advertisements.

[@Lemonholster]

Please do more weird stuff!

[@LoVeAmBiEnT]

Source audio is right there with Strymon. Easily.

[@shckltnebay]

Now that analog dry through is a feature!

[@mikelewis762]

Nice Kraftwerk jam!!

[@sourceaudioeffects]

Isn't that stuff great?! All the Kraftwerk clips were recorded by our friend Mark Neary with the C4 Synth. Here is the full video - kzbin.info/www/bejne/pF6ceZqKiNacopY

[@loveforallbxlmannif]

Thanks that's very encouraging ! Specially when you try to make an overdrive code and it sound like shit and ring even at high sample rate ;)

[@oedebiri]

These microcontrollers these days are for sure running pretty high clocks... An ESP32 is at 240MHz? Is he already retired?

[@kevinnel7038]

Yeah I'm surprised there haven't been more music projects using it

[@rodrigo_dm]

I'm building an entire synth using it. It's super nice.

[@foobar476]

I took that to mean sampling frequency - i.e. that's what you would need to get a decent simulation of those analogue components. For each microsecond, a whole bunch of work would need to take place so the clock speed of the processor would need to be orders of magnitude more than that.

[@moresnacksplease526]

I want to be like you... Where's your Github? XD

[@WarrenBey]

Sorry but those spring reverb algorithms are missing the dynamics of the pick and how the spring in the tank takes that wave as a multiplier. There are no dynamics in the springs noise. Listen to that Miserlou cover then go listen to the original they are vastly different and you really notice how spring reverb doesn't work in digital yet. kzbin.info/www/bejne/o3zTpKh9gsqkfqs

[@shckltnebay]

Your decision to add analog dry through changed my mind about SA effects, I have aversion to people who don't like people JK