RANDOM STUFF THAT NEEDS A PLACE TO BE

I have loads of info that I would like to put somewhere, but it doesn't really fit. So, here it is, warts and all.

On Writing a VST. Writing code is faster than building a tube amp prototype

• Building Tube Amps & Writing About Them:
  • I have a lot of stuff written on how I would build a tube amp, so it wouldn't take long to complete and really publish. It originally was part of the Cigar Box Guitar Amplifier Notebook but I didn't feel comfortable with letting that information out.
  • I did use the tube test harnesses to dial in a really nice, totally unique, Class A tube amp. But, I want to make it better. If I'm going to write a book about it, it needs to be better.
  • I was looking at building a bunch of the tube test harnesses when I remembered an old idea. I thought to put each test harness in a VST. I understood the math now and I think it will work.
• Hacking Amplitube / ReValver:
  • In early versions of ReValver advertised that you could edit the amp at the component level. I originally had thought to modify a schematic in the software, press a button, and magically be able to hear examples of these different circuits I had drawn out. Sadly, ReValver never worked as a design tool to build new amps. You were simply meant to accept designs that were built into the software and tweak them a very little bit. It was the mid-90’s and perhaps computer power just wasn’t there to deliver this kind of capability yet. I never gave up on that original idea.
  • AmpliTube is another guitar amp sim / modeler in VST form. I don’t recall much more about it other than it worked on my limited computer at the time and it sounded nice blasting through the equally limited 1-inch computer speakers. I did enjoy the fact that I could click on a few things and twiddle virtual knobs to make changes in real-time. But there was still no way (as far as I could see) for me to create something from one of my own designs.
  • If I couldn’t change the amplifiers in ReValver or AmpliTube directly, I could hack into them, decode what was needed to emulate an amp, hack those emulations, and even write a tool to encode my own amp designs for fun. I thought about this for a long time but never got beyond sifting through the object code.
  • Writing a couple of VSTs to emulate each module in an amplifier is more realistic and more in line with designing an amp from the ground up.
• Development Environment:
  • MacOS... AU... XCode... - No. I tried it again after a couple of decades. I don't care if it's a superior platform, architecture, development environment. I've gone back and forth between UNIX, LINUX, Windows enough that my time is better spent just sticking with the clunky and often frustrating update cycles that Microsoft forces me to accept. Pi-hole may be the solution to that problem.
  • Windows... Love it and hate it. I can get to the goal faster by just working with what I have and what I know.
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