0
The developers at sonible are a passionate bunch when it comes to audio. Developing plug-ins isn’t just something they do during working hours but also in their free time. One of these developers is Janos Buttgereit. He develops plug-ins under the name Schrammel and a GPL-3.0 license.
When Janos was 12 years old, he wanted to build amplifiers for electric guitars – quite an interesting wish for such a young boy but it was a very strong one. Janos went from being a tech enthusiastic, guitar playing kid who always wanted to understand, modify and build guitar equipment to being an electrical engineering student who gets to realize his ideas both at work and at his desk at home.
Janos has recently released OJD. The sound of this free open source guitar distortion plug-in might remind you of a popular analog e-guitar distortion effect pedal. He put a lot of effort into analyzing the analog circuitry of said effect pedal, identifying its circuit components that are responsible for the characteristic sound and developing a digital emulation that sounds very similar to it.
Although OJD is a medium gain e-guitar distortion effect, perfectly suited to the indie and rock genre, the plug-in can be used in many different creative ways. “A friend of mine used it on synthesizers. That’s the cool thing about releasing a guitar effect device as a plug-in, you can use it where the hardware version normally wouldn’t allow,” says Janos.
“My first tip is to place OJD before a guitar amplifier or an amp simulation plug-in in your signal chain. Secondly, there are two modes in OJD: “HP” and “LP.” These abbreviations stand for Low Peak and High Peak modes and are switchable via a small button. LP mode sounds softer because it lets the equalizer – which is controlled by the tone knob – affect the lower frequency regions more and leads to less distortion. This mode matches very well with any kind of single coil pick-up electric guitar. HP on the other hand sounds more aggressive and offers a bit more gain. This mode rocks a bit more and works especially well with Humbucker-equipped electric guitars. These are only suggestions of course. Generally, I think it’s best to begin with all controls set to mid-position and then just play around from there.” Janos Buttgereit, developer at sonible and creator of OJD.