After borrowing a classic EQ unit and seeing various impulse responses for non typical devices online, my mind drifted to whether you could build an EQ plugin from impulse responses.
Effectively, freezing the IR of an EQ at a particular settings and then use a serious of IF statements on the low, mid and high knobs to load the corresponding response.
The theory is nicely detailed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGEEpWPGIYI
and would effectively map dialled in settings against a grid. If the coordinate has been located by dials, then the correct IR loads in.
IRs are fantastic at capturing character. A little bit of modulation could be added to the end, slight delay for movement. This is something that I will explore and play with at some point in the future. Judging by the following stream on programming JUCE (link), I think this is highly doable.
I could see the creation of a gridded shell with dials in place that would switch between IRs for quick EQ unit mapping.
As an alternative, I thought about following the tutorial for building an EQ in JUCE from here (link) and then use Bertom’s Audio EQ Curve to send pulses into my hardware EQ in order to map the character of the EQ curves. Bertom’s tool feeding a pulse into the hardware would tell me how the hardware slopes fall, the angles and the character of the Q and how they change over time. I read that the particular box I managed to get hold of has an adaptive slope, travelling from -12db to -6db over the frequency which gives it some really nice character. I would then see if I can get a neutral impulse response as a backbone under the the EQ to add some natural saturation coming in from the box.
It could be a fun project to look at but then, I also have a stash of other classic boxes that I would like to build midi controllers for and I don’t want to lose sight of having fun making music. It’s very easy to go down rabbit holes with music.
I’m new to the JUCE framework but after using CtrlrX and LUA, it looks fun. If you have any thoughts, please let me know!