While the back ends for both Acoustic and Electric have much to admire, to my mind the most innovative thinking went into the front end, which is essentially identical in Acoustic and Electric. So from here on I’ll cleverly refer to those aspects as the front end and the back end. It’s convenient to discuss both of these instruments by separating the keyboard-to-note translation function from the function that produces the sound. So that’s exactly what we’ll do right here. But when Cakewalk bundled the former with its latest release of SONAR, Strum caught my eye and I though a closer look would be in order in spite of them being a half-decade old. I had somehow completely overlooked AAS’s two guitar modeling instruments, Strum Acoustic and Strum Electric, introduced in 20 respectively. Although I’ve had no experience with Chromaphone, AAS’s Ultra Analog, a decade-old virtual subtractive synth, has long been a personal favorite. AAS’s Chromaphone, which combines various models to produce the sound of drums, mallet-played instruments, and more appeared in 2011 to high acclaim. From that as a starting point, one can also generate sounds that have no equivalent in reality by altering some of the parameters used in the sound generation. What AAS specializes in is acoustic modeling – generating sounds that have the same characteristics as the real-world behavior from formulas. So it should be no surprise that Applied Acoustics Systems (AAS) turned out to be other than your typical soft synth development operation. And if that amount of mental fire-power weren’t enough, a third PhD joined the team later that year. Well, OK, maybe it wasn’t a bar, but in 1998 the two PhDs, both also musicians, got together to found a company to produce music creation computer software. We look at how mathematical simulations can conjure up an impressive pair of guitar instruments.Ī PhD in physics and a PhD in mathematics walked into a bar. The wizards at Applied Acoustic Systems have a way with math.