I've done some of this using the daisy seed. For time based effects like reverb, the memory/hardware constraints can be spicy. Definitely maxed out the seed hardware before achieving the (very long) level of reverb I wanted.
The hardware descriptions here seem on the light side. I'd want to be confident that it can handle intense time based effects.
It's promising that they seem to allow arbitrary write to the device, and only charge for tokens for the people that require the prompt playground.
Looking forward to see where this goes.
As an aside: building an ear-pleasing FDN reverb on an obscure-ish board with intense hardware optimization needs has been one of my favorite barometers for the abilities of new LLM models.
Haha, that's pretty clever. They get to sell $299 pedals, $20 plates, and upmarked "tokens" for their playground. Great example of selling shovels in a gold rush.
A cortex M7 developer board kit sells for about $40 on aliexpress. Throw in a few switches and a $10 case and you can have the same thing for ~$60 while doing almost no work yourself.
I don't know if they did anything fancy like increase the ram or storage or build a custom IC, so YMMV, of course.
My guitar teacher has a Line 6 HX Stomp multieffects pedal. In addition to programming effects patches use Line 6’s HX Edit desktop application, he also uses ChatGPT to generate patch files (they’re just JSON) by describing the effect or referencing a specific artist or song by name.
As I understand it, the difference between that and the pedal above, is that “patches” on the line6 are describing a chain of pre-existing effects. So like, phaser->delay->reverb. The polyend pedal you’re actually able to write custom dsp - so you’re able to build new units to chain together.
I do want something I can just buy and use out of the box. The hothouse seems to come close, but it'll add up to $180 once you include assembly and the daisy seed.
Hopefully if the concept catches on more there will be more options for hackable pedals on the market.
Usually, I'm not a big fan of Polyend products. They look cool, but they lack depth. Not the best tracker, not the best beatbox, etc. And also, I'm totally into Puredata and devices like Organelle, but the learning curve is steep. I get the idea of a vibe sound modeler. Not my alley, but that's interesting for a niche, I'd say.
They should have used a screen for the front plate and have the IA generate a visual. But then they'd pass the $20 per plate.
I don't like these kind of products, what I get in breadth I lose in depth, it's like having a enormous Steam library but only play the first half an hour of each game because I have limited time to invest and too many things. I'm already overwhelmed with my Katana 100.
I will say though, for a beginner, the breadth-first approach isn't bad--they don't know a good phaser from a bad phaser, but they know a phaser from a not-phaser; let them learn what a phaser is from a cheap DSP pedal, and if they like the sound, they can buy a real one.
This is more or less how i learned guitar effects, using cheap digital multi units from ~2005-2010; adding a natural language interface to that doesn't have to be bad, though I'd obviously prefer it explain what it's doing and not just presenting an un-investigable final output. Regardless, there is and always will be a market for beginner guitarists, and at the right price point, i could see this being good for them.
They have a public github repo with examples of code, that’d be a good place to start - but you could also check out the electrosmith daisy seed, a little audio dev board. Someone has made a pedal enclosure for it so you can diy something VERY similar to what this is (minus the vibe coding tools).
Hmm. I don't hate the idea by any stretch, but it low-key feels like an IR-2 gets you almost all the way there with a lot less money and effort. Not to mention i trust Boss to survive decades of touring.
Like i said i don't hate the idea. I think it's just a difficult market for this kind of idea.
I play guitar, I've built many pedals, i worked in music retail for the better part of a decade.
I think "one thing does all" pedals are hugely attractive to beginners, with good reason, and I even used to recommend such things to beginners specifically. When i was young, a digital "i can try on every effect ever made!" was an amazing value proposition--assuming the product was cheap enough for my parents to buy it for me. That was usually a Zoom 606 or DigiTech GP50 -- not anything anyone would want to gig with, but an amazing birthday present for a junior guitarist.
Anyway, the reason i never pursued building guitar gear as a job, even though i built plenty of gear i used personally, was mostly because of what i mentioned:
1. Reliability above all else. Charging professional prices for guitar gear means that shit better survive being stomped on 30x/week and a couple a three beers being spilled on in its lifetime.
2. TPB, no question. Use high quality switches, switching caps as needed. Silent, un-loaded transition between on and off is huge -- though, if you're offering delay effects, tails might be desired, the user should have an override, which would require buffered bypass instead. Just be sure to communicate which you use so people know (publishing raw input/output impedance is good; designing to work with vintage impedance-sensitive fuzz, even better)
3. I think most high end guitar players are hyper-picky, and a "Jack of all trades" unit doesn't appeal--the market for that kind of device is decidedly mid-market, and must be priced appropriately to succeed.
It's cool, though. I remember using some GNU audio real-time FX app and plugging my guitar straight into my SoundBlaster and having a great time, despite the unusable lag it all induced.
I think you could capture serious players by offering presets, IR import/copying a given input sound, of course durability, and multi-functionality: is this can replace one effect at a time? Cool I guess, but i have a pedalboard. Can this replace ALL my pedals, including routing and stacking? Vastly more appealing. If it's all software, stacking effects is probably already in the codebas3, and routing would be trivial.
Split the audio signal in two, offset the phase of one copy by a varying amount centered around 90 degrees, and mix the two signals back together. Let me control the speed that the phase varies, and the depth of the phase change.
Something like that?
Now, knowing that is something that would sounds cool - that’s the hard part :)
From a cursory glance it appears to be a physical guitar pedal that lets you program virtual effects. The "vibe coding" aspect is likely a system directive + effects library SDK docs fed into an LLM along with the user prompt that generates the appropriate C++ which is then compiled into an effect and run on the pedal.
Note: Which is still very cool. The previous programmable guitar pedals that I've seen were all pretty low-level.
RickS|1 month ago
The hardware descriptions here seem on the light side. I'd want to be confident that it can handle intense time based effects.
It's promising that they seem to allow arbitrary write to the device, and only charge for tokens for the people that require the prompt playground.
Looking forward to see where this goes.
As an aside: building an ear-pleasing FDN reverb on an obscure-ish board with intense hardware optimization needs has been one of my favorite barometers for the abilities of new LLM models.
gyomu|1 month ago
BizarroLand|1 month ago
I don't know if they did anything fancy like increase the ram or storage or build a custom IC, so YMMV, of course.
dfajgljsldkjag|1 month ago
> A simple delay could cost $1.00 or $2.00, whereas a complex granular looper might cost up to $5.00.
These prices don't seem reasonable unless there's some really special sauce in their ai.
cpeterso|1 month ago
kennywinker|1 month ago
But there are other pedals that do custom code, rather than just custom patching, see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727231
jawilson2|1 month ago
kennywinker|1 month ago
A pedal you can define with code? Kinda cool, definitely already exists, but kinda cool.
A pedal where you buy tokens to feed the ai monster to generate code to customize your pedal? Ugh. I want off this ride.
Edit - other hackable pedals:
https://www.electrosmash.com/pedalshield
https://www.op-electronics.com/en/dsp-multieffect/696-diydsp...
https://clevelandmusicco.com/hothouse-diy-digital-signal-pro...
dfajgljsldkjag|1 month ago
Hopefully if the concept catches on more there will be more options for hackable pedals on the market.
platevoltage|1 month ago
ricokatayama|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
draven|1 month ago
I don't like these kind of products, what I get in breadth I lose in depth, it's like having a enormous Steam library but only play the first half an hour of each game because I have limited time to invest and too many things. I'm already overwhelmed with my Katana 100.
queenkjuul|1 month ago
This is more or less how i learned guitar effects, using cheap digital multi units from ~2005-2010; adding a natural language interface to that doesn't have to be bad, though I'd obviously prefer it explain what it's doing and not just presenting an un-investigable final output. Regardless, there is and always will be a market for beginner guitarists, and at the right price point, i could see this being good for them.
monatron|1 month ago
kennywinker|1 month ago
https://clevelandmusicco.com/hothouse-diy-digital-signal-pro...
queenkjuul|1 month ago
Like i said i don't hate the idea. I think it's just a difficult market for this kind of idea.
I play guitar, I've built many pedals, i worked in music retail for the better part of a decade.
I think "one thing does all" pedals are hugely attractive to beginners, with good reason, and I even used to recommend such things to beginners specifically. When i was young, a digital "i can try on every effect ever made!" was an amazing value proposition--assuming the product was cheap enough for my parents to buy it for me. That was usually a Zoom 606 or DigiTech GP50 -- not anything anyone would want to gig with, but an amazing birthday present for a junior guitarist.
Anyway, the reason i never pursued building guitar gear as a job, even though i built plenty of gear i used personally, was mostly because of what i mentioned:
1. Reliability above all else. Charging professional prices for guitar gear means that shit better survive being stomped on 30x/week and a couple a three beers being spilled on in its lifetime.
2. TPB, no question. Use high quality switches, switching caps as needed. Silent, un-loaded transition between on and off is huge -- though, if you're offering delay effects, tails might be desired, the user should have an override, which would require buffered bypass instead. Just be sure to communicate which you use so people know (publishing raw input/output impedance is good; designing to work with vintage impedance-sensitive fuzz, even better)
3. I think most high end guitar players are hyper-picky, and a "Jack of all trades" unit doesn't appeal--the market for that kind of device is decidedly mid-market, and must be priced appropriately to succeed.
It's cool, though. I remember using some GNU audio real-time FX app and plugging my guitar straight into my SoundBlaster and having a great time, despite the unusable lag it all induced.
I think you could capture serious players by offering presets, IR import/copying a given input sound, of course durability, and multi-functionality: is this can replace one effect at a time? Cool I guess, but i have a pedalboard. Can this replace ALL my pedals, including routing and stacking? Vastly more appealing. If it's all software, stacking effects is probably already in the codebas3, and routing would be trivial.
echoangle|1 month ago
kennywinker|1 month ago
Something like that?
Now, knowing that is something that would sounds cool - that’s the hard part :)
aanet|1 month ago
vunderba|1 month ago
From a cursory glance it appears to be a physical guitar pedal that lets you program virtual effects. The "vibe coding" aspect is likely a system directive + effects library SDK docs fed into an LLM along with the user prompt that generates the appropriate C++ which is then compiled into an effect and run on the pedal.
Note: Which is still very cool. The previous programmable guitar pedals that I've seen were all pretty low-level.