Post by ashcatlt on Feb 21, 2019 19:46:35 GMT -5
Posting about the Undertaken the other day, I realized that I haven't really kept y'all up to date on this. I posted about the Infernal Diseased Dire Rat below, but I've got several others that some of you might find interesting. You could probably search the Reaper Stash for my name (I use an underscore in other forums), but I guess I'll go ahead and make it easy for you. 
I have some other plugs, but here I'm going to collect the ones I've written more or less as "guitar pedals". None of them are really "modeled" so much as approximated. Some of them are based on things I've actually built, but not all. I have a couple more ideas that I'd like implement, and I think I might rewrite some of these soon, but I can update or reply to this thread when that happens.
TILT!!! Distortion
Just uploaded this today and am actually telling you about it before the Reaper community. It is loosely based on a thing that I came really close to actually building - had it on the breadboard, a graphic, and even drilled the box. The basic concept is like a "tilt" style tone control like in the old hi-fis. It's NOT a tilt control, but that's the idea. In practice it sounds more like the tilt buzzer on an old pinball machine, which was what the graphic was to have alluded to. It actually is a dual band extreme distortion. The extreme low end and extreme treble are each smashed through their one gain/clip section. The one and only parameter on the face of the unit pans/mixes between the two, and then that goes into a sort of midrangey relatively high gain distortion stage somewhat like a Rat. To the left is dark, sludgey stoner metal. To the right is screechy, spitty black metal. In between is a surprising variety of extreme gain.
The original was built around an LM324 quad opamp running off a 3V rail and all of the distortion comes from overdriving that. This is one of the few commonly available JFET input opamps that can function on a power supply that low. It's also interesting in that its output will swing all the way to the bottom rail, but only to within about a diode drop from the top, so at 3V and biased halfway up, it can swing 1.5V below and 0.7ish above the "audio ground", an asymmetry very much like that of the fairly common LED/Si clipper. In the plugin, I actually have the asymmetry kind of opposite for the two sides, like one is biased "hot" and the other biased "cold". Not sure it makes a difference, but... I've also been told that it exhibits some crossover distortion that supposedly makes it "unsuitable for audio", but ya know I think it's the DOD/Digitech Death Metal pedal (correct me if I'm wrong, I know it's something like that) which includes series diodes for crossover distortion. That also works as a crude sort of noise gate, and I'm using something very similar in a couple different spots to keep it from blowing and howling when you stop playing. If you want it to screech and self-oscillate on breaks, or adjust a few other things, there's a set of "trim pot" variables right toward the top of the code that you can edit to your own liking.
the Undertaken - octave down (+up) fuzz
I posted in a thread of its own below. I have a couple of fixes to implement which might make it work a little better, or at least more efficiently, but it's perfectly functional as is.
Companded Pedal Delay
I couldn't find a delay plugin that does infinite repeat quite like some digital pedals (like my Boss GigaDelay) do. Those that allow unity gain feedback usually just let new input to add up and keep getting louder and escalate toward infinity. An actual pedal sort squashes everything together so that after a certain point it doesn't really get any louder, and there are ways to kind of swamp out old repeats with new input. A lot of that comes from the compander that wrapped around the actual digital part. Part of it is just plain clipping via "protection" diodes that actually just look like a back-to-back clipper pair. Those pedals are also usually "undersampled" by lowpassing around 10K on both sides, too. I've got all those things in this plugin. The one big difference between this and a pedal is that it is synced to the BPM of the project, and times are specified in fractions of whole notes. It's a bit tough to recommend this one because it's set up kind of specifically to emulate the way I use my GigaDelay, so the parameters are a little weird, and I think the time constants are all off by a factor of 2 because I have almost always run my sequences at double tempo in order to increase MIDI timing resolution. I should fix that one of these days... It's not exactly the same as the GigaDelay, but definitely does what I want it for quite well.
639/1337 drive
This one is based on the pedal I built for my bass player, which I've posted about in the forum in the past. It's essentially a wide open Rat pedal with a little more gain and less bass than normal with a variable clean mix. Two knobs. One controls a low pass on the clean side and the other controls the mix from pretty much all distortion to somewhere close to a 50/50 blend. Both the meatspace and virtual version have been compared to a buzz saw, but there's actually a surprising range of usable tones in there. The plugin version includes a "flip bottom" parameter that turns the distorted side into a full wave rectified octave up fuzz.
NSFW Boost
Another one based on a real DIY pedal. This one is a booster with some bonus features. One knob for gain and three switches - one for more gain, one to cut bass and make it into a treble booster, and the third adds soft clipping. With both of those switches on, it's very much like a Tube Screamer but with a bit more available gain.
Infernal Diseased Dire Rat
Another one based on a pedal I've actually built. I have threads for both the analog and digital versions around here. Basically a Rat with a couple of asymmetrical (which don't really work in the analog pedal, but really do in digital) and no diode clipping. Like the 639, the plugin version has "flip bottom", which is what makes it infernal.
LT Ring Mod
This one isn't really a full fledged "pedal", but it might be the very first working JS plugin I wrote. You run two different signals into it - one on the right and one on the left - and it multiplies the signals together. This thing was for a while a pretty important part of the Lorenzo's Tractor live sound. I would run my guitar into one side and the bass into the other. When we both played single note lines, we could get variations of that synthy alien bell like classic ring mod tone, and when I played chords or noise, it sounds more like a mix of our instruments through a broken radio or something. It has crossover distortion based gating for both inputs to help alleviate "carrier bleed" and make sure that it only makes noise when both sources are playing. Otherwise, that's all it does. It really benefits from pretty heavy distortion afterward, and I have some ideas to make something a bit more standalone functional. For now, it's more like a module to be combined with other things.
LT Sin Amp
Isn't so much a pedal as a simple and relatively efficient amp sim. It's pretty decent and flexible as is, but I usually sandwich it between a pair of ReaEQs for which I have developed presets matching as close as possible the response of PodFarm amp and cabinet models. Those I have also uploaded to the stash, but I think they were messed up when I put them there, so I want to replace them before I link you. The "Sin" is that it uses a sine function for clipping. Most of the rest use either a hyperbolic tangent or a "logistic" curve which are actually identical and very closely approximate a typical diode clipping curve. The sine function requires a hard clip to keep from folding over on peaks (that's quite a different, but kind of interesting noise), but it's slightly more efficient and kind of proves that actual curve doesn't make that much difference to the overall sound. I made this to have something lighter than PodFarm that I could slap on multiple sources in my live rig where CPU overloads can be catastrophic. With the right EQ settings on either side, it works really well and is barely discernible from the PodFarm versions that use about twice as much CPU.
That's what I've got out there at the moment. Mostly distortion, I guess. That's partly because they're relatively simple, but there's so much room for experimentation with symmetry and pre and post filtering. Plus, distortion is fun.
I hope some of you find some of these interesting. Please try them out and let me know what you think.
I have some other plugs, but here I'm going to collect the ones I've written more or less as "guitar pedals". None of them are really "modeled" so much as approximated. Some of them are based on things I've actually built, but not all. I have a couple more ideas that I'd like implement, and I think I might rewrite some of these soon, but I can update or reply to this thread when that happens.TILT!!! Distortion
Just uploaded this today and am actually telling you about it before the Reaper community. It is loosely based on a thing that I came really close to actually building - had it on the breadboard, a graphic, and even drilled the box. The basic concept is like a "tilt" style tone control like in the old hi-fis. It's NOT a tilt control, but that's the idea. In practice it sounds more like the tilt buzzer on an old pinball machine, which was what the graphic was to have alluded to. It actually is a dual band extreme distortion. The extreme low end and extreme treble are each smashed through their one gain/clip section. The one and only parameter on the face of the unit pans/mixes between the two, and then that goes into a sort of midrangey relatively high gain distortion stage somewhat like a Rat. To the left is dark, sludgey stoner metal. To the right is screechy, spitty black metal. In between is a surprising variety of extreme gain.
The original was built around an LM324 quad opamp running off a 3V rail and all of the distortion comes from overdriving that. This is one of the few commonly available JFET input opamps that can function on a power supply that low. It's also interesting in that its output will swing all the way to the bottom rail, but only to within about a diode drop from the top, so at 3V and biased halfway up, it can swing 1.5V below and 0.7ish above the "audio ground", an asymmetry very much like that of the fairly common LED/Si clipper. In the plugin, I actually have the asymmetry kind of opposite for the two sides, like one is biased "hot" and the other biased "cold". Not sure it makes a difference, but... I've also been told that it exhibits some crossover distortion that supposedly makes it "unsuitable for audio", but ya know I think it's the DOD/Digitech Death Metal pedal (correct me if I'm wrong, I know it's something like that) which includes series diodes for crossover distortion. That also works as a crude sort of noise gate, and I'm using something very similar in a couple different spots to keep it from blowing and howling when you stop playing. If you want it to screech and self-oscillate on breaks, or adjust a few other things, there's a set of "trim pot" variables right toward the top of the code that you can edit to your own liking.
the Undertaken - octave down (+up) fuzz
I posted in a thread of its own below. I have a couple of fixes to implement which might make it work a little better, or at least more efficiently, but it's perfectly functional as is.
Companded Pedal Delay
I couldn't find a delay plugin that does infinite repeat quite like some digital pedals (like my Boss GigaDelay) do. Those that allow unity gain feedback usually just let new input to add up and keep getting louder and escalate toward infinity. An actual pedal sort squashes everything together so that after a certain point it doesn't really get any louder, and there are ways to kind of swamp out old repeats with new input. A lot of that comes from the compander that wrapped around the actual digital part. Part of it is just plain clipping via "protection" diodes that actually just look like a back-to-back clipper pair. Those pedals are also usually "undersampled" by lowpassing around 10K on both sides, too. I've got all those things in this plugin. The one big difference between this and a pedal is that it is synced to the BPM of the project, and times are specified in fractions of whole notes. It's a bit tough to recommend this one because it's set up kind of specifically to emulate the way I use my GigaDelay, so the parameters are a little weird, and I think the time constants are all off by a factor of 2 because I have almost always run my sequences at double tempo in order to increase MIDI timing resolution. I should fix that one of these days... It's not exactly the same as the GigaDelay, but definitely does what I want it for quite well.
639/1337 drive
This one is based on the pedal I built for my bass player, which I've posted about in the forum in the past. It's essentially a wide open Rat pedal with a little more gain and less bass than normal with a variable clean mix. Two knobs. One controls a low pass on the clean side and the other controls the mix from pretty much all distortion to somewhere close to a 50/50 blend. Both the meatspace and virtual version have been compared to a buzz saw, but there's actually a surprising range of usable tones in there. The plugin version includes a "flip bottom" parameter that turns the distorted side into a full wave rectified octave up fuzz.
NSFW Boost
Another one based on a real DIY pedal. This one is a booster with some bonus features. One knob for gain and three switches - one for more gain, one to cut bass and make it into a treble booster, and the third adds soft clipping. With both of those switches on, it's very much like a Tube Screamer but with a bit more available gain.
Infernal Diseased Dire Rat
Another one based on a pedal I've actually built. I have threads for both the analog and digital versions around here. Basically a Rat with a couple of asymmetrical (which don't really work in the analog pedal, but really do in digital) and no diode clipping. Like the 639, the plugin version has "flip bottom", which is what makes it infernal.
LT Ring Mod
This one isn't really a full fledged "pedal", but it might be the very first working JS plugin I wrote. You run two different signals into it - one on the right and one on the left - and it multiplies the signals together. This thing was for a while a pretty important part of the Lorenzo's Tractor live sound. I would run my guitar into one side and the bass into the other. When we both played single note lines, we could get variations of that synthy alien bell like classic ring mod tone, and when I played chords or noise, it sounds more like a mix of our instruments through a broken radio or something. It has crossover distortion based gating for both inputs to help alleviate "carrier bleed" and make sure that it only makes noise when both sources are playing. Otherwise, that's all it does. It really benefits from pretty heavy distortion afterward, and I have some ideas to make something a bit more standalone functional. For now, it's more like a module to be combined with other things.
LT Sin Amp
Isn't so much a pedal as a simple and relatively efficient amp sim. It's pretty decent and flexible as is, but I usually sandwich it between a pair of ReaEQs for which I have developed presets matching as close as possible the response of PodFarm amp and cabinet models. Those I have also uploaded to the stash, but I think they were messed up when I put them there, so I want to replace them before I link you. The "Sin" is that it uses a sine function for clipping. Most of the rest use either a hyperbolic tangent or a "logistic" curve which are actually identical and very closely approximate a typical diode clipping curve. The sine function requires a hard clip to keep from folding over on peaks (that's quite a different, but kind of interesting noise), but it's slightly more efficient and kind of proves that actual curve doesn't make that much difference to the overall sound. I made this to have something lighter than PodFarm that I could slap on multiple sources in my live rig where CPU overloads can be catastrophic. With the right EQ settings on either side, it works really well and is barely discernible from the PodFarm versions that use about twice as much CPU.
That's what I've got out there at the moment. Mostly distortion, I guess. That's partly because they're relatively simple, but there's so much room for experimentation with symmetry and pre and post filtering. Plus, distortion is fun.
I hope some of you find some of these interesting. Please try them out and let me know what you think.