ChowDSP: Chow Centaur
A free, transparent overdrive plugin based on the classic Klon.
19 November 2023
Chowdhury DSP is a project created by Jatin Chowdhury with the intention of developing innovative and high-quality audio software, as well as making that software available to the widest audience possible. ChowDSP software is driven by the desire to create useful tools for musicians and audio engineers; tools that sound great, are easy to use, and provide musical inspiration.
Chow Centaur is a digital emulation of the Klon Centaur guitar pedal. The plugin contains two modes, ‘Traditional’ which uses classic circuit modelling techniques, and ‘Neural’ which uses a recurrent neural network to model the gain stage from the original Klon circuit. The model is constructed using a variety of circuit modelling techniques, including nodal analysis, wave digital filters, and recurrent neural networks. The model is implemented as an audio plugin (Standalone/VST/AU/LV2) for desktop and iOS, and as a guitar pedal-style effect embedded on a Teensy microcontroller. Work began on this plugin as part of a class project for EE 292D at Stanford University. More technical details can be found in the accompanying technical paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.02833
