Electric Guitar Distortion

   
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Find a distortion for a clean electric guitar signal (incl. amplifier and cabinet)!

As input you get the clean guitar sound played from a musician playing the song ‘paranoid’. The musician himself already used the distortion pedal ‘Classic Distortion’ to produce a distorted sound matching his taste. After distortion he used linear filtering (external with MATLAB) modelling the speaker cabinet of his choice. This way he got the final guitar sound.

Equipment you need:

  • distortion pedal,
  • audio interface,
  • a head phone, and
  • a laptop with powerpoint.

Details of the exercise:

  • Try to find the original song ‘paranoid’ and listen to the guitar. (e.g. youtube).
  • Look into the user guide ‘Classic Distortion’ to learn about the possibilities of sound distortion (12 classic types of distortion!).
  • Use the clean input from our musician and feed it into the ‘Classic Distortion’ pedal, find the distorted sound you like.
  • Make your first distortion trial with ‘Clean Boost / EQ’ only using overdrive, next find a ‘better’ solution from the 12 types offered.
  • Use the equalizer section of ‘Classic Distortion’ modelling the speaker cabinet (this replaces the external convolution).
  • Fill-in your audio results into this exercise sheet (use a sound card for recording the processed signal).