Digital Guitar Sound Design Question

Hey everyone!

I was recently inspired to create a digital/midi guitar sound. This is a guitar, where your input is theoretically converted into a midi and you can assign all sorts of sounds. But specifically I’m interested in a sound similar to this: How to impress everyone with Digital Guitar in 30 seconds - YouTube

For me personally It’s not important to convert the guitar to MIDI but rather change the sound via effects that it sounds that way. Even though if there would be a way for making reliably to MIDI, especially when capturing chords and not just single notes. That could be quite interesting too.

My idea to make it sound as if it would be digital is to basically bit crush it plus some effects (i used pitch shift). Because then you at least have a square wave. But i would still prefere the bell-like, more sinus-like sound, as in the Video.

Not sure what could be a good approach to do so. Maybe Waveshapers or vocoding/something FFT related. Is anyone with inspiration?

My first try to do something digital sounding is here:

//load the buffer
//path of the current file, .wav needs to be in same folder like .scd
~path = PathName(thisProcess.nowExecutingPath).parentPath;
//just loading first channel because the second channel is silent
~buf = Buffer.readChannel(s, ~path++"muchimpress.wav",channels:[0]);
~buf.play;
(
~guitar = {
	arg amp=0.4, gain=3;
	var sig, root;
	//uncomment what you want:
	// root= SoundIn.ar(0); //pluging in guitar
	root= PlayBuf.ar(1,~buf,BufRateScale.kr(~buf),1,0,1); //having buf
	//effects:
	root= (gain*root)!2;
	sig = root;
	sig = sig.tanh;
	sig = Compander.ar(sig,sig,0.5,1,0.3);
	sig = Compander.ar(sig,sig,0.5,0.75);
	sig = sig.blend(LowShelf.ar(PitchShift.ar(sig,0.05,2,0,0.1,1),440,1,-5),0.4);
	sig = sig.blend(LowShelf.ar(PitchShift.ar(sig,0.1,2,0,0.1,1),440,1,-5),0.4);
	sig = Decimator.ar(sig*1000,5000,1,1);
	//reduce general noise:
	sig = Compander.ar(sig,root,0.02,2,1,0.01,0.03);
	sig = sig.tanh*amp;
	sig= FreeVerb.ar(sig,0.2,0.3);
}.play;
)

To recreate the sound, I also recorded quickly the first few bars of that video on my guitar with not effects on 1 channel. here is the .wav, you can download and put it in the same folder as the code where you would save the code above and test it or play around with it.

I’m grateful for any ideas! Thanks!

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