# Digital Distortion effect algorithm

I read the DAFX book by Udo Zölzer about the distortion effect at pages 124-125 and it says that suitable simulation of the distortion is given by the function:

$$f(x)=\frac{x}{|x|}\left(1-e^{x^2/|x|}\right)$$

Is someone can explain this formula and what kind of signal we get?

From what I understand 'x' is the sampled signal, so this is a sequence of numbers. what does |x| means? the absolute value of x for each sampled value?

So if I want to implement this simulation of distortion effect so:

1. I need to know the length of x (It's given by the number of samples)
2. In a loop I need to calculate this formula for each sample value
3. after the loop ends, I get the distorted signal (in a digital form)

After that I need to convert it to analog signal so I can hear it.

• Note that there's an error in the formula given in the book (there should be a negative sign in the exponent). See my answer below. – Matt L. Feb 21 '16 at 20:00

|x| denotes the absolute value - the x / |x| bit of the formula is there to make sure that the sign of the input is preserved in the output. Regarding the implementation, yes, the steps you have listed are correct.

• What do you mean by "real distortion"? Absolutely any operation you do on the original signal would be distortion anyway! What are you trying to do? – pichenettes Dec 12 '13 at 10:31
• Distortion is a very vague term which describes any (usually unwanted) transformation that alters the signal. Guitar distortion is achieved by many different processes - clipping, rectification, overloading - depending on the kind of pedal/amp in which it happens - there is no single "true" formula... The formula you have looks like it'll give a sigmoid-like function which would simulate overloading ; but I think it might have a mistake somewhere. – pichenettes Dec 12 '13 at 11:00
• You have to do this in the time domain. – pichenettes Dec 13 '13 at 22:56
• Because that's how guitar distortion effects work. They were originally made with non-linear elements like tubes, diodes, and later transistors whose behaviour is described in the time domain by a non-linear function. And you're trying to emulate that digitally... – pichenettes Dec 14 '13 at 8:39
• Pitch-shifting, fancy harmonies generator (say EHX micro pog) or fancy spectral morphing (can't recall the product name) require frequency-domain processing. Some amps/speakers simulator require long convolutions, which are performed efficiently by multiplications in the frequency domain. But in any case it's NEVER "take the whole FFT of the signal" - this is implemented by overlap-add of small-length FFT (1024 samples or so). – pichenettes Dec 14 '13 at 12:33

Thanks to the plot in Olli Niemitalo's answer I got convinced that the formula given in the book has a sign error. The non-linearity used for fuzz or distortion is always some type of smoothed clipping function, which compresses the input signal. So small input amplitudes experience little change whereas high input amplitudes are (more or less) softly clipped. And the figure shown in Olli's answer does exactly the opposite.

So I'm convinced that the correct formula should be

$$f(x)=\frac{x}{|x|}\left(1-e^{-x^2/|x|}\right)= \text{sgn}(x)\left(1-e^{-|x|}\right)\tag{1}$$

For small values of $x$ we have $f(x)\approx\text{sgn}(x)|x|=x$, and for large (magnitude) values we get $f(x)\approx\text{sgn}(x)$, i.e., clipping.

This is a plot of the corrected non-linearity $f(x)$ (WolframAlpha):

The formula should also be simplified like the right-most expression in $(1)$, because a beginner might be inclined to literally implement the other formula and try to evaluate the terms $x/|x|$ and $x^2/|x|$, which is unnecessarily complex and also gives trouble when $x$ is close to zero. A typical implementation would look like this:

if (x > 0)
y = 1 - exp(-x);
else
y = -1 + exp(x);
end

• Oh yeah the book misquotes web.archive.org/web/20070826204128/http://www.notam02.no/… and the above is the correct formula. – Olli Niemitalo Feb 21 '16 at 21:33
• OK, thanks. Do you think that this was the book's source? – Matt L. Feb 22 '16 at 8:29
• Yes the book referenced that student thesis. There was a second Norwegian student thesis that had the wrong formula and cited the first student thesis. I didn't bother to check dates to see if the book copied the second thesis without checking the original source or if the second thesis copied the book. – Olli Niemitalo Feb 22 '16 at 8:38
• @OlliNiemitalo: Typical case of error propagation. I'm also not sure why they use silly expressions like $x^2/|x|$. As I've added to my answer, some beginner might end up implementing this literally. – Matt L. Feb 22 '16 at 8:40

You can write the body of the function directly into Wolfram Alpha and it plots it:

It looks like a waveshaper to me, and those can be used as you describe.

• Now that I see your plot, I'm quite convinced that the formula in the book is wrong. See my answer. What do you think? – Matt L. Feb 21 '16 at 19:54
• @MattL.Yes that makes much more sense. The book's function is also descending which would cause an unwanted phase inversion. – Olli Niemitalo Feb 21 '16 at 20:07