Pickup Modeling

A magnetic pickup on an electric guitar measures transverse string velocity to a first approximation. Therefore, virtual magnetic pickups are most easily simulated when the string delay line is considered to hold traveling velocity-wave samples. In this case, a new magnetic pickup can be simulated by simply summing the two corresponding samples in the delay line, as illustrated in Fig.1.11,^D.15and derived in Appendix H.

In the same way that the pick-position comb filter of §D.2.2 can be factored out into a separate series comb filter, each virtual magnetic pickup can be similarly factored out into a series comb filter. Since series comb-filters commute (when they are not time varying), they can be implemented together, e.g., in a separate effects unit fed by the basic string model, or in a single consolidated FIR filter.^D.16

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Subsections

• Generalized Pickup/Pick-Position Modeling

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Order a Hardcopy of Physical Audio Signal Processing

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written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.