Welcome.
If you're here, then you've probably been dabbling in DAWs and plugins for a while, and if you've bothered enough to peek at this post, then I'm pretty sure you're curious about why we're here.
See, circuit modelling isn't new. Line 6 and Amplitube were doing it long before I ever plugged in. What changed over the last ten years or so is what it costs to get in: Modelling that used to mean a hardware purchase or a flagship-priced suite now runs at roughly pedal money, and it's genuinely good. That's the part I've been watching.
What tickled my mind though was how these same plugins used for mixing tracks could be used in a live context.
So I tried it. I run my guitar rig now in LiveProfessor: amp sims, cabs, overdrives, delays, reverbs, compressors, even dynamic EQs and spectral processors that normally wouldn't be feasible as analog circuits.
The sound was almost there. The CPU wasn't. I was trading anti-aliasing for CPU headroom while trying to keep buffer sizes low: a compromise that works, but I knew instinctively that a better solution exists. It just isn't being actively sought, because most of the people writing plugins aren't the ones standing on stage running them.
Hi, I'm Mendy, and I've been a guitarist since 2006. Straight out of college I went into live audio, mostly calibration and system design on L-Acoustics rigs, measured with SMAART, REW, and more recently OSM. I ended up in live audio because of my first love: guitar.
After a few years I had to leave to help with our family construction business. But playing music is something that never leaves you. Musicians, you know this: You can put an instrument down for years, and when you pick it up again the muscle memory is still sitting there waiting.
So after everything, it circled back to here. Music.
And I admit, as a guitarist first and foremost, the one thing that will never go away is GAS.
Which is one reason Mendy Audio Labs exists: to feed the GAS without breaking the bank. Guitar pedals and amps are circuits, and a circuit behaves in ways you can model in code. How well you model it is the whole game.
But I have to admit that while I have a career in live audio, I have no experience in DSP maths or code. Realistically, there's no way for me to work this out myself.
What I do have is the other half of the job. My whole career has been calibration, and calibration is a discipline where you don't get to claim something sounds right: You measure it, and the measurement wins the argument. I can't derive a filter. I can absolutely tell you whether the thing in front of me is doing what it claims, and I've spent years being paid to do exactly that.
I also know which way my own ears lie. Mine are tuned for live, which means my studio mixes come out bass-heavy. Which, ironically, I don't like either. Knowing that about yourself is the same habit pointed inward, and it's the part I trust most.
Which brings me to the other reason Mendy Audio Labs exists: what if agentic AI can code for me? AI is taking a lot of flak (understandably). But what if we use it to bridge a skill gap? I may not know how to code, but I know what guitar pedal effects sound like. I know what a double-tracked guitar sounds like against a faked one, and I know why it matters (two separate takes are decorrelated, and the manner in which they're decorrelated is the thing your ear is actually responding to).
So: a guitar dude with years in guitar and audio, zero experience in DSP and code, and a measurement habit he's betting will cover the difference. It might not. That's the experiment, and you're welcome to watch it run.
Will we succeed? We can dream.