Hello from the bench

I'm Seth. I have been a Software Engineer since around 2012. I am a musician, a tinkerer, and a maker. I built my first guitar pedal out of Radio Shack parts around 2001. I've been playing with tube amps since about 2002. I build Cathode at a bench where I've got a Peavey VTM 60 in various stages of torn apart, a broken Korg MS2000 mid-repair, and my dev laptop. This is the first devlog. I'm aiming for at least one post a month whenever building.

Here's what these are for, so you can decide right now whether they're worth your inbox.

What this is

I've always wanted to design and build my own tube amp. I've spent the past 11 years as a dad with no safe place to actually keep a live high current open circuit safely away from my kids. I also want to tinker without committing to learning the ground-up safety practices that would be required for this hobby. Sure, I've torn into a few tube amps for some small repairs. That VTM 60 I mentioned is BEGGING for me to finish modding it... but what if I actually don't like the result? What if I wish that I would have just left it mint?

Cathode plays guitar amps (or pedals... or hopefully any audio circuit...) as live circuits instead of snapshots. Turn a knob and the whole amp responds, the way the real one does when tone and volume fight over the same signal. The free Player loads any amp the community designs. Designer lets you open one up and change anything, down to the parts.

Here's what I'm imagining (see the status board for progress): a designer builds a circuit. Maybe it's a brand new design, or a mod of their favorite amp design, or maybe it's a new pedal they're working on. They freeze their circuit and share only that frozen module without exposing the circuit, keeping the schematic to themselves. A friend loads it in their copy of the free Player and it sounds and responds exactly the same way for them - and the knobs are accurate too! OR if they don't care about protecting the circuit design, they can choose to share the circuit openly. They can post it anywhere they want, the circuit is just a text file.

That freezing part — while keeping its knobs live — that's the hard part, and it has the most work left on the status board.

Today, the escape hatch that already works on my bench is simpler: export a NAM profile of a design and share that instead.

That's the pitch. The devlog is where I show the work behind it.

The devlog

Every devlog will share something like: what shipped since last time and what I'm building now. No roadmap with dates on it, because dates on a project like this tend to be just hopes and dreams. No one knows how long it will take to invent something. Call it the audio-proof rule: when something's real, you hear it, with a recording attached, not a mockup.

If a month goes sideways and nothing ships, I'll tell you that too. The bench doesn't always cooperate.

Why build it in the open

Plenty of amp sims show up polished and quiet about how they got there. I'd rather do it the other way, with the rough edges showing. You get to watch a real circuit simulator grow up, argue with me about features, and hold me to every promise on the rest of this site.

Eventually we'll have a means for public 2-way communication, some live GitHub repositories (I plan to open-source portions of the project), maybe a subreddit, who knows.

On AI assisted coding

You may hear me reference "Claude" or etc... here and there. If you're a musician, you may feel negatively about AI. I do too. An AI generated song is an awful travesty. AI can be misused, even for coding. You may have heard the term "AI Slop" - that's a real thing and again, absolute travesty. These things are going to create problems and debts that humanity has only begun to understand the ramifications of.

That being said: I am a tenured professional software engineer and my friends are too. I know how software is built. AI is the best thing that has ever happened to Software Dev. If you don't believe me, go read what Linus Torvalds has been saying about it lately - cautiously optimistic, real danger, great tool in the hands of a professional. That's exactly where I land. A professional software engineer can effectively wield a tool like Claude Code without creating "AI Slop" - I promise

"Vibe Coding" is a different thing!

What about LiveSPICE?

When you go searching for a way to tinker in the digital domain, you find LiveSPICE. LiveSPICE is an incredible achievement and I'm so grateful that it exists, especially as an open-source reference. It proved years ago that you could play a guitar through a simulated circuit in real time, and it deserves enormous respect for that. Its last real release was early 2024 though, with only a build-maintenance commit since, and it's Windows-only - built on a UI stack that appears to actually lock it to that platform.

I am NOT a Windows guy - I needed a way to tinker without Windows. I also wanted to build something that is truly aimed at both the tube amp designer (Electrical Engineer) and also the musician. I want the tube amp designer to be able to build any audio circuit they can imagine with an interface that's tuned for exactly that task. I want that design to be shareable. I want an engineer to have the freedom to design a new pedal and share it with a community for feedback before having a run of circuit boards printed up.

Pull up a stool. I'll take the back panel off and show you the twiddly bits.

When it's ready to play, Cathode Player will be free.