Stairway to Hammerschlag is our capstone design project for 18-500: ECE Design Experience at Carnegie Mellon University. This is a course that all undergraduate students in the electrical and computer engineering department must complete during their senior year to be eligible for graduation, and it gives us a chance to work on a semester long, interdisciplinary project of our choice in teams of three.
For our project, we are creating a guitar pedal effects simulator. Guitar pedals are circuits that transform audio signals as they come out of an electric guitar, and can be used to form all kinds of interesting effects. Currently, pedal designers or musicians who wish to tinker with the inner workings of their guitar pedals really have no better option than to assemble the circuits on a breadboard to see how they sound. We hope to fix this problem by creating a platform that enables users to describe their pedal circuit using a clean, polished circuit builder interface. Once the user has entered their pedal design in our GUI, our software will be able to analyze the circuit and simulate how it will impact audio signals that pass through the virtual pedal. The hope is for the musician to ultimately be able to plug a guitar into the computer, and play the instrument to see exactly how the virtual pedal sounds before they invest any time or money in obtaining a physical version. Of course, it may be cumbersome to require a real guitar to test out pedal designs, which is why we intend to allow pedal simulation against recorded tracks as well. Our hope is that this project will allow musicians and pedal designers alike to enjoy a smoother pedal design process, allowing musicians to be even more creative with the sounds they produce!