Since the 1940s, electric guitarists, keyboardists, and other instrumentalists have been using effects pedals, devices that modify the sound of the original audio source. Typical effects include distortion, compression, chorus, reverb, and delay. Early effects pedals consisted of basic analog circuits, often along with vacuum tubes, which were later replaced with transistors. Although many pedals today apply effects digitally with modern signal processing techniques, many purists argue that the sound of analog pedals can not be replaced by their digital counterparts. We’ll follow a deep learning approach to see if we can use machine learning to replicate the sound of an iconic analog effect pedal, the Ibanez Tube Screamer. This post will be mostly a reproduction of the work done by Alec Wright et al. in Real-Time Guitar Amplifier Emulation with Deep Learning1. Alec Wright et al., “Real-Time Guitar Amplifier Emulation with ↩

A simple, configurable, cross-platform youtube-dl wrapper for downloading and managing youtube audio (with added features).

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. http://espeak.sourceforge.net

eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

License music from the only royalty free audio library dedicated to retro music.

If you have a digital audio device that can connect your guitar to a PC, here is some software you can use to record, edit and process the signal.

At Focusrite, our motto is “Sound Is Everything”, and every Scarlett USB 2.0 audio interface exemplifies sound quality with top-quality precision digital conversion, and Focusrite’s legendary mic preamps – two of which are included in the Scarlett 2i2. Like all Scarlett interfaces, 2i2 is fully compatible with Macintosh® (including Yosemite®) and Windows® - and with the new included Red 2 and Red 3 AAX plugins, it’s a perfect partner for Pro Tools®.

Rubber Band Library is a high quality software library for audio time-stretching and pitch-shifting. It permits you to change the tempo and pitch of an audio stream or recording dynamically and independently of one another.

jack_mixer is a GTK+ JACK audio mixer app with a look similar to its hardware counterpart. It has lot of useful features, apart from being able to mix multiple JACK audio streams.

The LASH Audio Session Handler, for saving and restoring sessions with multiple programs with a single command.