Intro to Design??

[Eternal Dragon]

In light of my recent troubles with my first design project I'm thinking maybe I need a shove in the right direction. I'm looking for a way (either adding/subtracting amplitudes, frequencies.... whatever type of synthesis that works the best) where I can form pretty much any shape I want. Hard task, I know. Its probably not the best solution for a lot of things, but if I ever get into stuff like keyboard synthesisers then I guess I'll need a solution like that..... yer??

Anyway, plz just fire design tips and ideas at me cos i'm ultra-eager to get stuck into FX .

[Steve Conner]

Quite a few of us have websites where we wrote our design tips and ideas down... I'm sure you already saw R.G. Keen's at http://www.geofex.com and Mark Hammer's at http://hammer.ampage.org which are both great resources on music effects technology. You also might like to look at the music-dsp mailing list and source code archives, since the ideas you already mentioned seem well suited to implementing with DSP. It seems quite possible these days to plug your guitar into a computer and start coding effects.

I started out messing with amps and effects when I was studying EE at uni too. I ended up trying to build a new design of tube guitar amp that wasn't based on anything else. It was fairly successful. There's some information about it on my site at http://www.scopeboy.com