Subtle Saturation for Acoustic Instruments

Guitar Pedals
1

I’ve been working for some time on a balanced piezo preamp for acoustic guitars/mandolins/etc. My prototypes work wonderfully, but I’ve been wanting to add some DSP.

I have already come up with FIR filters for making the piezo signal more microphone-like. However, I’d also like to add some saturation.

LR Baggs has an acoustic guitar pedal that has some subtle saturation built in. I want something similar, and not too extreme. I figure that compression is a good place to start for this effect, but it will also need harmonic generation, probably non-linear in effect.

I’m interested in a “tape” or “transformer” type of sound, as opposed to a “tube” saturation. Does anyone have a good place to start?

If all else fails, I’ll just use my Daisy for the FIR and some other filtering, and do the saturation in the analog domain, by applying a controlled DC voltage to a transformer primary. But, it would be nice to have it all done on the Daisy.

2

I’ve used tanh saturation before, and in some of my csound patches I’ve used this clip opcode:

https://csound.com/docs/manual/clip.html

You might try with those methods and different thresholds.

I think the Bram de Jong method originally came from here:

https://www.musicdsp.org/en/latest/Effects/42-soft-saturation.html

Cheers

1 Like
3

Ok, sweet! I will give some of this a try. That’s actually way simpler than I imagined.