[afro88]

I think you're hand waving away all the complexity. You're right that distortion is pretty much waveshaping. But all the nuance, "warmth" and lovely non-linearities that make these pedals highly sought after is the really really hard part. It can't be simply solved with convolution.

The same pedal from this post has been pain stakingly circuit modeled by Cytomic[1] over the past few years and still isn't out of beta. Analog circuit modeling is a huge thing in DSP right now because it's the closest we have to proper 1:1 software clones of analog hardware. But it's incredibly time consuming.

I'm really excited by this use of WaveNet. It could drastically cut down the time to clone old costly to maintain hardware. But it will have some way to go before you can tweak the parameters in realtime. Or so I assume?

[1]: https://cytomic.com/#plugins