Usually all "analog" can be generalized and approxmiated with the
simplest means.
These designs are usually simple to begin with, as less components,
meant more profit.
Sometimes far below "audio-grade" components were used, for instance in
monophonic synths, or feedback paths or similar.
On vintage stuff, that typically was a wide knee, adding saturation to
the monophonic voice. And probably a higher grade component if summmed
in a polyphonic synth. On synths a gradually lower clipping before each
filter-stage will give a good approximation, while avoiding too much
coloration.
"Valve" has been a great discussion over many years, but as a musician,
the most complex path, you will ever need for sufficient saturated
guitar sound, is really EQ-compressor-softclip-EQ. Forget about the
nonlinearities of the components. They are not necessary to think about.
That is simply exaggaration, and seeing ghosts where there are none. And
add delay and reverb on that aswell, and play back on high-end speakers,
to really outpeform any old tube amp. :)
The softclip needs to sound good though. And here again, no exaggaration
or ubertheory is necessary. The simplest 3rd order knee, softclip will
usually do, and then you can also add some bias to that, for guitar. And
ofcourse threshold for kneedepth. Usually deeper for more vintage sound.
I already did this, in my "softclip" plugin. Which is a tweaked version
of such an algorithm, for most transparent softclip. If you go to the
parameters page, you can tweak it aswell, for deeper knee, etc.
Peace Be With You,
Ove Karlsen
Producer, researcher, engineer,
Monotheo
www.monotheo.biz
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