Around a year ago or so Iβve already started to look into a couple of stateful non-linear models which could be more suitable for a musical and convincing digital saturation experience. To make it even more harder, they should avoid the usual drawbacks such as huge latency or insane cpu consumption – if ever possible of course.
Meanwhile, my journey into the non-linear DSP land has made an important stopover with a first prototype implementation for such an approach, yielding a DSP core for musical harmonic distortion generation based on a stateful model. This opens the door for quite a number of interesting applications such as harmonic exciters or devices which needs convincing amp models whether thats a compressor output stage or even part of a guitar amplifier effect.
Anyhow, here is some very first food for the audio effect gourmets. As a starter I’ve prepared some creamy (sub) bass distortion to make thinks pretty much obvious to each and everyone. Note: Full-range speakers required.
As a second course we offer delicious full spectrum distortion with a filter sweep through a basic sequencer pattern. A small portion of distortion is applied on the synth itself and delay + reverb are performed afterwards. This mainly shows the absence of aliasing especially in the higher frequency department. Also subtle imaging improvements with a more “3d” sound is presented.
As a sweet, I’m strongly recommending to test its application as a nasty non-linear output stage in a compressor. In this program material based example, compression is always in but in the beginning just with a simple linear VCA implementation. After the 1st bar a second order harmonic kicks in which highly reacts to the actual program dynamics and a further overall nonlinear behaviour gets increased in four steps.
The last one is a bit subtle at first but pretty much over the top to the end. Nevertheless, I hope you’ve enjoyed todays meal here.
Related links:
Variety Of Sound 
Oh my goodness ! This sounds sick. Can’t wait to see your first plugin powered by your newly developed tech.
After eating that I want more π ! So tasty hehe… Top quality meal for sure.
Interesting. How about a short before/after on some program material that is the exact same segment in both cases? Thinking about doing an exciter? Finally putting Crane Song out of its clipper misery? π
Lets see what the first one will be. The engine can be configured for quite some tasks…
Brilliant, the alias free HF especially caught my attention, so silky smooth, i cant wait for you to implement this new technology into a plugin, go Bootsy!
Sounds very sweet to me. What is the bit depth/sample rate of the demos? I found the fourth sample a little bit thin at the top, but only a hint compared to what I’d like to hear.
Looking forward to this in a plugin. Nowadays I use a Nagra for serious saturation tasks, but this is very convincing.
All files are only mp3’s and there is also nothing mixed or tweaked – naked as they are coming from the synth. Just the delay+reverb for example 2 was added.
I would be very interested in uncompressed demos, where it’s possible to hear the frequencies past 16 kHz, opposed to mp3. Given, those frequencies exist in the original material, so there’s anything to hear.
It does not sound like stateful saturation β it sounds like TASTEFUL saturation lol=)
Looking forward for this implemented!
Cant wait to check this out bro…. Thanks ..
Great!
Wicked sick!
Yummy ! Oh yeah… mmmmm