In the field of music technology, certain products stand out as having unique and desirable characteristics. Musicians will go to great lengths to find an instrument or piece of equipment that produces a particular sound or feel. As technology progresses, products that may have been popular in the past become obsolete, yet musicians still demand them for a specific artistic purpose. This research is concerned with preserving the sound of classic musical electronics, namely guitar amplifiers and distortion circuits, through modeling the circuits and emulating their sonic characteristics using efficient techniques to simulate audio circuits.;This work applies concepts from the field of physical modeling for musical synthesis, namely that of computing as much as possible beforehand to reduce the amount of work to be done in the time-critical run-time loop. This is done by an intricate understanding of the physics of the system, analyzing the system as much as possible beforehand, and simplifying the run-time computation to the bare minimum needed to recreate the behavior accurately.;Specifically, this work introduces the use of circuit analysis to derive and emulate digitally the signal paths of guitar distortion effects circuits. This work also explores in depth the use of numerical methods to simulate nonlinear circuits for real-time audio processing as a recursive nonlinear filter and develops a systematic method for deriving the nonlinear filter corresponding to a circuit. Finally, this approach will be applied to some basic building blocks of guitar distortion circuits.
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