Introducing Guitarix (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Dave Phillips takes a look at Guitarix. "According to its developers Guitarix is a monaural amplifier designed for creating the distorted sounds typical of thrash, heavy metal, blues, and other rock guitar styles. In fact, Guitarix is capable of much more than distortion sounds. In this article I'll remove the software speaker grill and pull out the virtual chassis to take a closer look at the sonic possibilities of this "simple mono amplifier"."

(Log in to post comments)

Introducing Guitarix (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 27, 2009 0:25 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Guitarix looks like a nice tool.

Years ago, I thought something like this, a free software amp simulator, would be great, but I envisioned it running on a PDA with a USB footswitch. Desktop probably makes more sense, given the amount of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) these days.

Then again, could something like this be ported over to portable devices, both for live recording and as a headphone amp? Possibly. The UI looks a little big, but that could be changed.

Introducing Guitarix (Linux Journal)

Posted Aug 28, 2009 9:30 UTC (Fri) by filteredperception (guest, #5692) [Link]

If you're talking about portable devices and guitars, I have to throw in a plug for 'Guitar-ZyX(tm)'(viros.org/guitarzyx), which is my creation entirely different from Guitarix. I've currently got a piece of NDS homebrew I first released 8 months ago, together with a fedora derived livedvd/usb, which let you use the NDS as a remote control, or even velcro'd to your guitar, to control rakarrack parameters in real-time. I.e. 'supertouchwhammypad' if you will.

Sadly I just had to take down my latest release for shall we say 'iceweasel-ish' trademark reasons. In a couple days I'll have sedded out the offending trademarks from the GPL code, along with adding more features.

The key here is that a single bootable microSD can boot both the NDS and the PC into a cooperating appliance, which even includes the complete source code and development tools to modify any part of the software on either the PC or NDS side.

Now digressing from the plug, to your point- I do have several features you mentioned on the roadmap. Due to limitations of the NDS (speed writing to flash), live recording without the PC may or may not be possible. But wireless to the PC should be doable with some perhaps acceptable amount of added latency. And simple amplifications to the headphones should totally be doable, though might require hacking your own 1/4" jack to 5$ NDS microphone+headphones, as I have done (and sadly, those microscopic wires are freakin hard to work with). In any event you're probably better off trying to accomplish the same thing with a gphone or the like. But I'm convinced I can make a 5 year old PC and a 5 year old NDS do some excellent things when connected to a guitar and speakers. What I've got so far isn't too shabby, but definitely still in the version-0.1.* range. And I've got to get back to work unleashing the weasels to devour annoying trademarks preventing me from redistributing unmodified GPL packages provided by someone who had to be compelled by the FSF to provide corresponding sources to their binary releases.