Get with the programmers
We find out what piece of hardware a true analogue head dreams about modelling. As if we couldn’t guess!
What’s your background in music and in programming? What draws you to analogue hardware modelling?
MS “Before becoming an independent developer, I was fortunate to spend much of my professional career with a well-known recording console manufacturer, which afforded me the opportunity to work alongside some of the most knowledgeable and talented people in the pro-audio industry.
“I got into electronics and music quite early on, building and fixing guitar processors, amps and other equipment for my own use. DSP was a much more exotic (and expensive) commodity at that time than it is now. I got into programming when 8-bit home micros were just starting to become available, so my initial experience was making small games in Z80 assembly language! It’s surprising how many techniques learned back then are still relevant today.”
What’s your approach to emulating hardware? Convolution? Modelling? Sampling? Replicating circuits? Or a combination?
MS “A lot depends on the specific hardware. Normally it’s an iterative process of understanding the circuit behaviour, looking at how best to emulate that in software with our own DSP libraries and modules, and then repeatedly fine-tuning and testing to get the best result.”
How do you make a hefty, CPU-heavy algorithm more efficient without affecting the sound quality too much?
MS “By avoiding unnecessary processing. This may sound obvious, but typically this might mean finding new ways to put as much of the ‘heavy lifting’ as possible outside of the main audio processing path, or using techniques which reduce the need for things like oversampling, high internal sample rates or algorithm complexity, for example.”
“I got into electronics and music quite early on”
How would you like to see plugin standards and/or DAWs change to let you push the boundaries?
MS “I’m mainly concerned with hardware emulation and a more ‘analogue’-style workflow, so I’ve yet to run into something which I couldn’t do due to a limit with DAWs or plugin formats. But I think most developers would agree that, while the audio processing often remains quite portable between operating systems and plugin formats, graphical/GUI code tends to get very incompatible very quickly. If I could spend less time hacking graphical UI code and more time doing audio, I’d be much happier!”
Is there a dream piece of hardware you’d love to emulate?
MS “I’m not sure if a DAW can ever fully capture the experience of working with a large-format mixing console. There’s something about having the physical controls in front of you that you just can’t get with a mouse, monitor and keyboard… but I’d certainly like to have a go at console emulation.”
What’s next for OverTone DSP?
MS “Hardware emulation is something I’m still passionate about, but there’s plenty of room for other products, too. A dynamics processor to accompany our AF2-10 Graphical EQ might be one attempt, and I’m currently porting the existing products to some interesting alternative platforms – the plugins are also available for Raspberry Pi, for example.”