Developer’s Note: Efektor Series

Let’s say the modeled FX types is our interpretations of the exact hardware, or more likely, inspired by hardware pedal effects available in the market, both vintage and new.Our Efektor Series are receiving lot’s of rave responses from the Community (much thanks for all of you!). Meanwhile, we are receiving lot’s of questions regarding which actual hardware effect pedals/stompboxes represent each of the Efektors. So here’s our answer:

Taken from The Big Muff: History of All Variations

It’s true that during the research we modeled many-many kind of effect pedals, and at some point, found some similarities between them except some differences in parameter values, then narrow them with some optimizations so basically our Efektors can cover most of the available pedals out there. Try them out!

We are meticulously modeling so many legendary pedals for our algorithm database until it reached nearly 100 pedals. But after comparing them one by one with the actual hardware effect pedals, we found a rather disappointing truth; many of them are quite similar sounding with only small variations of tonality (due to choice of components, this explain why similar effect pedals built in different decade, a reissue, or newer revisions can sound different) or difference in parameter ranges. If we set the parameters uniform among all similar effect pedals compared, they sound quite similar. We picked the ones which can represent many, and sounded significantly different between each types, whether the stages, delay-lines, sweeps, etc (won’t go too much into much technicalities). For example for the Chorus, we picked the ones which can represent them in regards of how many delay lines or how much degrees differences on phase each type has.

The Kuassa Modulation Efektors

As for the sounds, we tried to cover all the tonalities as possible from all the modeled pedals, as we said, it’s initially from 20+ pedals: DOD, Ibanez, Vox, Korg, Danelectro, and many more. The decision to narrow them to three types on each Efektors, because when we did the DSP modelling, many of them can be represented by small numbers of the types of modulation we released inside the Efektors.

Efektor Distortions for Reason’s Rack Extension

In addition, If you dig more about each of the fx type on every device, you can somehow correlate them with the actual hardware that we are using to model the DSP algorithm. For example, Heavy Distortion is a type of distortion which commonly used by guitarists during the glory days of Heavy Metal genre, but, we decided not to directly named it after the actual device due to some optimizations to the modeled fx compared with the actual hardware because it’s not 1:1 exact replica, tone-wise.

So that’s our answer so you can peek a bit about what happened during the development of our Efektors guitar effect pedal emulations. And oh… some of them are free! Please go see each of them: