This week I did some research on a good choice for our analog effect. I concluded that overdrive/distortion would be the most valuable analog effect due to the difficulty in effectively modeling transistor clipping in digital software. From there, I looked at available reference schematics to see what options would be quick to implement, without the need to re-invent the wheel. I was also hoping to find something relatively unique but fully practical. I found a vintage 70’s analog overdrive effect called the Colorsound Overdriver and loved the sound after watching some YouTube demos of the pedal. Not only did it have a great sounding overdrive, but if you boosted the gain high you could get a nice distortion, and even a fuzz effect at the highest gain. It’s a super versatile effect, and it would be a cool bonus to add to BARI given that clones of the effect cost $100+ and the original can sell for over $1000 (according to Reverb).
I narrowed down our MVP digital effects to be EQ, reverb, and chorus. EQ will be useful for guitarists who want to adjust the tone of their Bluetooth speaker, since unlike traditional guitar amps, the speaker won’t have bass/treble dials. Reverb will be great for singers or even instruments who want a fuller sound, and it is a staple effect among musicians. Chorus is a modulation effect that gives the impression you have a “chorus” of guitars playing together, and makes for a good combination with the other effects. The team helped me narrow down some metrics to test the quality of the effects, such as control resolution for adjusting parameters for the effects. We are thinking of using MATLAB to compare spectrograms of the MATLAB simulations of the output of each effect to BARI’s output to determine if we successfully implement the effects on BARI.
I also worked on some miscellaneous tasks such as setting up the website and providing information for the use cases slide for the project proposal. I need to finish writing about the System UI in our system spec. I am behind on this task, but will get it down early next week. Next week I will provide Adam with a file representing voltages from a guitar input so he can simulate the output of his Colorsound Overdriver circuit. I’ll also be available to help with the effect if needed. I will begin writing MATLAB scripts to simulate our digital MVP effects in software, which will be my focus for the next couple of weeks.