A departure from most weeks, let’s look at something that’s always interested me: how engineers emulate the sounds of classic analog devices, such as keyboards or sound effects, and make them available to anyone with a computer, or even a tablet.
Have you ever wondered how musicians apply reverb to their songs when they do everything on the computer? Where’s the long hall providing all that reverb? Or how a keyboard player on stage (or YouTube these days) can access hundreds of sounds with the push of a button?
The answer is that these sounds (in the case of the keyboard) or effects (in the case of reverb) are digitally emulated. And in this week’s Tech Tuesday, I’ll discuss how these emulations are made.
Digital Emulations
Emulation plugins are made by combining the following two methods:
- By analyzing the electronic circuit and exactly re-creating it digitally; and/or
- For reverb or other effects: sending a series of test tones through the device, or for keyboards or similar: creating sounds with the device and analyzing the output signals as a function of the device settings
The goal is to create a digital emulation that is either indistinguishable from the original device and usually contains options that the original device didn’t have.
Take this EQ audio equalizer for example:
If the reviews are accurate, this plugin sounds identical to the original hardware unit. And with this plugin, a recording engineer can use many instances of it simultaneously for the same cost.
So how do signal processing engineers do it?
Let’s concentrate on EQ for now. In essence, an equalizer (EQ) makes changes to frequencies in music. Too much bass? Use an EQ to subtract away low frequencies, and so on.
To emulate such a device, a known signal is passed into the unit and the deviation from this signal at the output is measured. With the device bypassed, we would expect the input and output signals to be identical. Then, one knob at a time, the settings are changed and the output measured. For complex devices with many knobs and settings, this can be a complex task, to say the least.
And the best part (for the listener) and the worst part (for the engineer creating the emulation) is that a lot of these analog devices deliver nonlinearities that are pleasing to our ears but quite challenging to model with a computer.
Most emulations contain a combination of the two methods mentioned above, since modeling the exact circuit often misses the nonlinearities and warmth that analog devices famously imbue.
Here’s a good article from 2010 and a more recent high-level article on the topic.
Is this something you’ve thought about before? I hope you found it as interesting as I do!
Cheers,
-Zank
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