New CLAM plugin: (’very’ for now) simple guitar distortion
Posted by hordia on December 9th, 2007
A week or more ago, Daniel Vidal Chornet (collaborator of Musix) asked me if i can develop guitar distortion effects, because he couldn’t find something decent that suits his needs, i said “sadly i have no idea about distortions effects and anyway i have no time right now to do that”, but then i remembered how useful could be the clam framework and i tried to do a little spike about. Results were better than i had expected at first (is not a super cool distortion, but at least sound like one).
Basically i merged and tweaked a couple of simple/base algorithms found in the web for distortion and compression and in less than 30 minutes i had something working and sounds like a guitar distortion (”clean” ones seems to sound better easily). I was amazed how fast and easy (develop and test in clam/networkeditor, once you get the basis) was. I think right now is far to be a good distortion, but as learning process and first demo seems very good.
Here some sound examples:
Original:
(dvlc-guitar.ogg)
With distortion:
(guitardist-ex1.ogg)
Test network looks like:
The source code is here (as NetworkEditor plugin): GuitarDistortion.tar.gz
Some optional tweaks could include add a three band filter but i’m still not sure if it’s better to put it at first or at the end.
Special thanks for testing and audio samples to Daniel Vidal Chornet. I should take from my closet my fender stratocaster and do my own samples 
. OTOH, we already arrange to do a remote gig with this.
Another useful NetworkEditor processings plugins i had made during this “work”:
- AutomaticGainControl: Adaptative automatic gain control. Given an output reference and step response adjusts the output volume to keep it constant (AutomaticGainControl.tar.gz)
- AudioSwitch: Switchs between a configurable amount of inputs (like a multiplexer) (AudioSwitch.tar.gz)
Related: LADSPA versions of my recent simple distortions
Update: Distortion rack prototype
, audio , c++ , CLAM , effects , english , free software , GPL , library , plugins , programming