mini pedal for guitar sim

[MadAnthony81]

hi,

Is there any certain book that can get me to being able to design a guitar pedal vst? I have plugnscript by Blue Cats and i'm getting really excited to make a guitar effects pedal.

To make more precise, I'd like to make my own sound of saturation/ distortion. Something totally unique...

So is there hope in this? Without going to to the copyright office? I won't be selling it (btw).


I want to thank you in advance. And for your interest!

PS. I use bx alliance and waves guitar plugs.

PSS Audified too!

I like them all but i want to make a sweet lead sustain! Like the vox ice 9.

Thanks! Peace

[mikejm]

There are a few steps you could take to learn what you want.

First of all, you'll need to understand basic stompbox design principles. Best place is Electrosmash:

Eg. For the Big Muff:
https://www.electrosmash.com/big-muff-pi-analysis

You don't need to understand all the circuitry in terms of capacitors and resistors unless you're planning to reproduce something exactly from analog.

What's more important is that you understand most distortion effects are just a combination of filters and gain/clipping/overdrive.

It's pretty insane how hard filtered a lot of distortion effects are. You often filter before the distortion, then after again. Sometimes the distortion comes in multiple stages. Sometimes the distortion and filtering come in multiple stages.

Look at some of the other pedals on that site and study those pedal breakdowns for the signal flow they incorporate and general shapes of their filters and you might start to get the principles.

Then in terms of coding it, I'm not familiar with the Blue Cats thing. I learned how to do basic signal processing in Reaktor because it's a simple visual environment and there's loads of tutorials out there. Then I switched to JUCE/C++ because it allows total and absolute building capacity from nothing for complex or abstract things.

But for an overdrive VST, all you really probably will need are some filters - first order(6db/oct slope) and second order (12 db/oct slope with resonance control) - high pass and low passes.

Then something for clipping your signals and or overdriving it more smoothly like a tanh function.

I don't think there's usually much more to it than that, unless you want to model nonlinearities/quirks of exact analog overdrive methods, and then you're going to have to go pretty deep into physics/code to get that.

[MadAnthony81]

aright!