In recent years, electric guitars have become an indispensable instrument in the world music scene. If an electric guitar is used, the timbre can be changed by passing through a circuit such as a filter at the electrical signal stage. In this way, effectors are widely used to change the timbre, and many professional musicians use a variety of effectors. When an amateur musician tries to copy the music of a professional musician, even if the same guitar or amp is prepared, the same timbre will not be achieved without the same effector. In addition, few musicians disclose the types and parameters of effectors, and the equipments are expensive. The reproduction of the timbre is done by trial and error based on experience and feeling by each musician. This is not an easy task for beginners. In this paper the timbre comparison methods is compared to easily reproduce the sound modulated by effectors. The methods evaluated in this paper are direct, FFT (fast Fourier transform), SFFT (short-time Fourier transform), MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) and meta-MFCC. The effects evaluated in this paper are distortion, reverb and delay.
Comparing the evaluation of characteristics calculate by a computer and that by human hearing, it is shown that distortion can estimate parameters with any characteristics accurately. The MFCC system was found to be good for three effects to reproduce the orginal parameters, especially SMFCC (short-time Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients)and meta MFCC were found to be particularly good. The computational cost of the FFT system was reduced to about20 percent compared to the MFCC system. There was almost no difference in cost in the FFT or MFCC system. The time cost for the comparison was low in the FFT and MFCC systems, especially the FFT, MFCC, and meta MFCC. Therefore meta MFCC is considered to be optimal if the specific gravity is compared in order of the human auditory characteristics.
