Web Audio Guitar Tube Amplifier vs Native Simulations

Michel Buffa (1) , Jerome Lebrun (2, 3)

1 WIMMICS - Web-Instrumented Man-Machine Interactions, Communities and Semantics
2 Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia-Antipolis (I3S) / Equipe SIGNAL
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

We propose to present a tube guitar amplifier simulation we’ve been designing using the Web Audio API with the aim to faithfully reproduce the main parts of the Marshall JCM 800 amplifier schematics. Each stage of the real amp has been recreated (preamp, tone stack, reverb, power amp and speaker simulation). We’ve also added an extra multiband EQ. This “classic rock” amp simulation we’ve been building has been used in real gigs and can be favorably compared with some native amp simulation both in terms of latency, sound quality, dynamics and comfort of the guitar play. The amp is open source and can be tested online, even without a real guitar plugged-in. It comes with an audio player, dry guitar samples and a wave generator that can be used as inputs. Figure 1 shows the current GUI, with some optional frequency analyzers and oscilloscopes that we’ve been using to probe the signal at different stages of the simulation. One purpose was to evaluate the limits of the Web Audio API and see if it was possible to design a web-based guitar amp simulator that could compete with native simulations.

Mots clés: webaudio; guitar; amp; simulation; modelisation; audio processing; audio

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Web; Multimédia [cs.MM]; Modélisation et simulation

Michel Buffa, Jerome Lebrun. Web Audio Guitar Tube Amplifier vs Native Simulations. Web Audio Conference 2017 – Collaborative Audio #WAC2017, Queen Mary University of London, Aug 2017, London, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-01589330⟩