Stompbox 2016
Digital Stompbox Design Workshop
CCRMA Summer Workshop 2016
July 25-29
Instructors: Esteban Maestre and Romain Michon
Contents
Course History and Description
Come design your own flavor of audio effect at Stanford Universityʼs Digital Stompbox Design workshop. We will teach you a new platform for implementing audio effects in hardware that not only allows you to recreate classic types of sound effects but also enables the creation of new sound effects. Our resources for new media design are also at your fingertips if you would like to re-design the concept of a guitar stompbox of effects unit: for example, design the layout and control interface of your effects unit, add accelerometers on your guitar or your hand and use it to control the parameters of an effect, or use some LEDs to simulate the glow of vacuum tubes or fire!
This workshop is intended for musicians interested in exploring new possibilities in digital audio effects in a hands-on and technical way; makers, engineers, computer scientists, or product designers interested in exploring artistic outlets for their talents and collaborating with musicians; and/or anyone looking to gain valuable skills in basic audio signal processing and human-computer interfaces, with a focus on invention.
Participants are required to buy a $170 lab kit included in the registration price. The kit contains Satellite CCRMA platform featuring Arduino and the Raspberry Pi 2 as well as a miniature audio I/O digital interface, knobs, buttons, footswitches, a number of other sensors, and a customizable acrylic enclosure. All this leading to a custom programmable effects unit to bring home after the workshop! Participants are encouraged (but by no means required) to bring their own laptop computers (with Ethernet support) and/or musical instruments, so that they bring home a working platform and the associated toolchain configured in their laptop, ready for deploying new effects and control paradigms.
This workshop was created by Edgar Berdahl and Esteban Maestre in 2011. This workshop uses very similar hardware to the New Music Controllers workshop, but the focus is more on applications to stompbox design and audio signal processing.
How to sign up for the workshop.
Course Schedule
We will meet from 9am-5:00pm daily, with mini-breaks at around 10:30am and 3:00pm, and a lunch break approximately between 12:00pm and 1:00pm.
Date | Morning (9am-12noon) | Afternoon (1:00pm-5:00pm) |
Monday |
Introduction and Overview |
Review Lab 0 |
Tuesday |
Review Lab 1 |
Faust effects lecture |
Wednesday |
Lab 2 Review |
FX Lecture 4 |
Thursday |
FX Lecture 5 |
Work on project |
Friday | Work on project | Project presentations (3:00pm - 4:30pm) |
Additional Resources
In this section we provide complementary materials for each day of the workshop. Because of the limited time we have for this workshop as compared to the vast amount of theory and literature behind digital audio effects and their implementation via different programming languages, the contents of these lectures are limited to introducing the very basics of some of the most popular types of audio effects used in stompboxes. For a deeper coverage of signal processing techniques behind digital audio effects, please refer to the CCRMA courses listed below (in the References section) and their complementary materials or books.
Monday
Basic PureData demo patches:
- Boost
- Tremolo (here without graphical signal displays)
- Noise gate (here without graphical signal displays)
- Compressor (here without graphical signal displays)
Bear in mind that these Pure Data patches were created to illustrate the basic principles of some elementary digital audio effects. For that purpose, some graphical displays were added as a visual complement to monitor some (control) signals. Remember that, although potentially useful for debugging/monitoring purposes, those graphical displays (i.e. the [table] objects) do not contribute to sound processing. However, they may cause the Raspberry Pi to run very slow, so it's good to remove them (together with the corresponding [tabwrite~] objects), or use the alternative patches not including graphical signal displays!
Lab Resources:
- Categorized list of Pd Objects (or here)
- Ugly guitar track 'solo_man.wav'
- More guitar/bass tracks (compressed ZIP)
- Nicer guitar tracks Courtesy of Jonathan Abel, please do not distribute.
Tuesday
FX Lecture:
Basic PureData Demo Patches:
- Biquad block example (here without graphical displays)
- Wah example using a 2nd order peaking filter (here without graphical displays)
Lab Resources:
- filters_by_mmb.zip Basic Pd filtering library by Mike Moser-Booth - Latest version (not checked) of the above library can be found at https://github.com/dotmmb/mmb.
Wednesday
FX Lecture:
Basic PureData Demo Patches:
- Distortion / Fuzz (here without graphical displays)
Thursday
Basic PureData Demo Patches:
Other Related Lectures
- PID Introduction
- Survey of Physical Interfaces for Music
- Introduction to Electronics
- Sensors
- Microcontroller Architecture
- Interaction Design Framework
Softwares
- The lectures will primarily be in Pure Data (Pd) Extended for sound synthesis. We will introduce some other alternatives such as writing plug-ins directly in C/C++ or with Faust.
- The micro SDHC card for your kit will be initialized with Satellite CCRMA so that you can get up and running instantly.
- The Arduino software could be used to change the Firmata-based firmware that gets data from the Arduino Nano board into Pd.
Workshop Project
One of the goals of this workshop is to help you get hands-on experience building a novel stompbox project of your choosing. You are encouraged to work with other workshop participants on the project, particularly those who might have skills that complement your own. Since the workshop is short, it is a good idea to start thinking of ideas during the first lectures and labs; during the second half of the workshop, you will primarily be working on getting a "demo-able" prototype ready for the project presentations on Friday afternoon.
References
- MaxLab
- PID Links
- Pure Data (Pd) Extended
- Raspberry Pi
- Arduino software
- Firmata
- Faust
- Course: Introduction to Digital Audio Signal Processing
- Course: Signal Processing Effects for Digital Audio Effects
FAQ
Project questions
- Can I do ____ for my project?
You can do whatever you would like for your project. Keep in mind that you really only have a few days to work on it, so you might want to focus on one crucial aspect of a larger project that you'd like to have working.
- Can I incorporate my own hardware and software into my project?
Yes, you can, although we have limited time and ability to support hardware and software other than what is introduced in the labs.