First Plugin

Category: Audio DSP Blog Published: Sunday, 07 April 2013 Written by steve

While I was busy experimenting with the dsp valve code the Guitarix team began releasing LV2 plugin versions their amps, at first these were hard wired configurations as the standalone amp has so many options it was not possible to make the plugin particularly usable unless it was simplified ( this is now not the case as a fully configurable plugin has now been produced ).

With the aim of becoming familiar with the LV2 architecture I decided to code a plugin based on my experiments and hence was born my first guitarix preamplifier.

This consist of a 2 stage valve preamplifier with a feedback loop and presence and resonance controls. Distortion/saturation is controlled by the level of the input gain.

Until recently one of the most common "complaints" about Linux audio plugins has been how they look, very little effort seems to have been made to make them "pretty" and thus many users are disappointed by the very computer like interfaces they are presented with. With recent releases from Calf Audio, Invada and LinuxDSP this is set to change as there is an obvious effort to bring them up to date with VST and other formats.

With this in mind I attempted to create a slick looking interface to the preamplifier plugin.

In use have found it very useful for adding a little bit of valve magic to individual instruments or to a whole mix. As is it is not intended to produce huge amounts of distortion, but just to add a little warmth and tone shaping, which it seems to do very well. It also works well as a boost in front of the Guitarix amplifiers.

Well chuffed!