Adversarial Guitar Amplifier Modelling with Unpaired Data

Alec Wright, Vesa Välimäki, Lauri Juvela

Abstract: We propose an audio effects processing framework that learns to emulate a target electric guitar tone from a recording. We train a deep neural network using an adversarial approach, with the goal of trans-forming the timbre of a guitar, into the timbre of another guitar after audio effects processing has been applied, for example, by a guitar amplifier. The model training requires no paired data, and the resulting model emulates the target timbre well whilst being capable of real-time processing on a modern personal computer. To verify our approach we present two experiments, one which carries out un-paired training using paired data, allowing us to monitor training via objective metrics, and another that uses fully unpaired data, corresponding to a realistic scenario where a user wants to emulate a guitar timbre only using audio data from a recording. Our listening test results confirm that the models are perceptually convincing.