Comment by rerdavies
3 days ago
Working on a Spice compiler to convert schematics for classic guitar pedals into real-time executable code.
I provided a reference to a The Spice Manual 2nd ed. a page number and an equation number, and asked Claude to implement it (not really expecting it to succeed).
It proceeded to implement not only the equation, but the calculation of the Langrangian of the functio, another 30 lines below, which required taking symbolic partial derivatives for a not-at-all trivial function, and successfully figuring out which variable was which in the resulting matrix. The source material just said "Lagrangian of", and did not provide the partial differential equations. And then providing a comment that identified the page number and equation number in the source text for the "Lagrangian of" equation.
That sounds awesome.
Do you think claude could help create something like the line6 "software based" guitars?
Current state of the art in guitar emulations are Neural Amp Modeler Core A2 plugins, which are dramatically better than Line6 amp emulations. (See the results of large scale listening tests in the following page that compare NAM A2 against current-generation Line 6 amp emulations).
Guitarix plugins actually use the technique I'm chasing (circuit diagram based simulation). I'm honestly not sure how Guitarix emulations stack up against Line 6 emulations, or whether Lin6 uses a similar approach. To my ears they seem to be of comparable quality. But NAM A2 is dramatically better than both.
I'm actually chasing this line of research as part of an effort to write a realtime-capable accurate emulation of a Dyna Comp compressor for inclusion in the ToobAmp collection of plugins that uses a hybrid approach (circuit simulation for the envelope generator, which NAM modeling struggles with, and a nano NAM model for the Operational Transconductance Amplifier at the core of the original effect, which is computationally expensive when using circuit emulation. Too early to tell whether that's a sound approach atm. Finding a good open-source library of Spice components (for branded diodes, transistors, op amps, &c) may prevent my circuit simulation project from reaching a publicly releasable state.
Disclosure of conflict of interest: My own open-source project (PiPedal, search for it if you're interested) relies heavily on NAM A2 models.
I think it's possible, but if you mean Variax, the trick was in hardware. I believe it had multiple pickups per each string.
... and to answer your question directly. No. I don't think claude could do it unless you guide it very carefully through the process. You need to have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.
That sounds pretty fun. I guess I could just Claude to do this hehe but are you sharing?
I'm not mostly Claud-ing it. Perhaps I should. But in the difficult bits, it never ceases to amaze me what these tools are able to do.
Yes, if it matures, it will go open source. Not immediately clear at this moment whether it's feasible to do an Operational Transconductance Amp in realtime. :-/
And it's competing for attention with the 2.0 release of this at the moment:
https://rerdavies.github.io/pipedal/
Just went GA, so I'll have some cycles to come back to it.