Since the advent of the electric guitar, musicians have been using and abusing their technology in order to discover and use new and different sounds for their compositions and recordings. At first, vacuum tubes were put in guitar amplifiers to cause the sound wave to clip in a controllable way: hence, distortion was born. Large rooms with strategically placed microphones would record the sound as it bounced off the walls and reverberated around the room, and from this delay effects were made. With Digial Signal Processing (DSP), musicians found a way to model these effect using mathematical algorithms and an embedded processor rather than expensive tubes and circuitry. Space no longer became a limiting factor, as a 1U rackmount could do more effects processing than an array pedals and amplifiers. In this project, we seek to understand and implement some of the principles that allow DSP systems to process a guitar signal and influence it according to some desired effect(s).

Work Distribution

High Level Design

Hardware Design