WebAudio Virtual Tube Guitar Amps and Pedal Board Design

Michel Buffa and Jerome Lebrun

This paper experiments how WebAudio can be used to design differents types of gears for guitarists: real-time tube guitars amplifiers simulations, pedal FX, and their integration in a virtual pedal board. We studied different real guitar tube amps and created an interactive Web application for experimenting, validating and building different amp designs that can be run in a browser. Blind tests have been conducted with professional guitar players who compared positively the real-time, low-latency, realistic tube guitar amps simulations we created with state-of-the-art native equivalents. We also created a set of “virtual audio fx pedals” that implement popular audio effects such as flanger, chorus, overdrive, pitch shifter etc.
These amps simulations and FX pedals have been finally packaged as “WebAudio plugins” that can be stored in plugin repositories (REST endpoints or local folders). We also developed a “host” application -a virtual pedal board- that allows us to scan repositories for plugins and chain/assemble them. All these developments are open source and can be tried online.