Zero-Latency Guitar Modulation Effects Modeling via Differentiable DSP

drscotthawley · x · 2026-08-05

Published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, this paper presents a framework based on differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) to model electric guitar modulation effects like flanger, chorus, and phaser.

The model trains in the time-frequency domain but operates in the time-domain during inference, requiring zero latency. It addresses challenges in gradient-based optimization, showing that low-frequency weighting of loss functions avoids local minima, and in some cases, the model's output is perceptually indistinguishable from analog reference units.

Original post →

More from Multimodal

Multimodal channel →