Griffiths, Duane (2023) Synthesis and Emulation of a Musician’s Signal Chain and Sound. [USQ Project]
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Abstract
The introduction of the transistor revolutionised the music industry. Electric guitar amplifiers were redesigned, and heavy, loud, and expensive vacuum tube amplifiers were being challenged by smaller, cheaper, more diverse, lighter solid state or transistor amplifiers. Lower levels of power to reach desired tones drove the popularity of digital amplifiers as the tones were able to be reached at vastly lower volumes than traditional vacuum tube amplifiers. As digital amplifiers became more popular, more and more musicians, while enjoying the convenience and user friendliness of the new amplifiers, desired the ‘warm’ and more pleasant tones of the vacuum tube amplifiers. This presented challenges for researchers to emulate the tones and acoustic characteristics of classic amplifiers and analogue effects to provide the desirable tones in the digital modelling amplifiers. Vacuum tube amplifiers and classic guitar effects were studied and digitally emulated, able to be downloaded as digital effects or plugins. The vast range of plugins grew exponentially with all makes and models of manufacturers providing digital versions of their classic sounds and effects. The huge range of plugins available has caused frustrations with guitarists attempting to emulate their guitar heroes and their unique guitar sounds. This project aims to allow a user to, instead of building a custom guitar signal chain with digital plugins, adjusting endless parameter settings and available customisations to create an input, sample a piece of recorded electric guitar, then extract the acoustic characteristics to emulate the target tone with a single processing framework.
The nature of the saturation in vacuum tubes creating the harmonic distortion responsible for the desirable tone proved challenging with end users not being satisfied with the tones as they sounded ‘fake’ and ‘hollow’ prompting manufacturers and researchers to further research the emulation of analogue amplifiers. This project explores what the ‘warm’sound is and why it can’t be emulated in digital amplifiers and explore opportunities to close the gap between analogue and digital amplifiers. Current emulation techniques are researched and a range of guitar samples across different genres, playing styles and timestamps are analysed to explore any visual correlations between waveforms, frequency spectrums and time frequency plots.
This project determines that current emulation techniques can emulate guitar tone from a recording in a controlled production and recording environment however challenges exist in real time applications due to the heavy computational cost and subsequent impact of latency and aliasing.
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Statistics for this ePrint Item |
| Item Type: | USQ Project |
|---|---|
| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Current – Faculty of Health, Engineering and Sciences - School of Engineering (1 Jan 2022 -) |
| Supervisors: | Leis, John |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) Electrical/Electronics Engineering |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Sep 2025 22:29 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Sep 2025 22:29 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | transistor, music industry |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52947 |
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