Will we ever see a truly new effect?

[crochambeau]

Are we talking about a completely novel process through which one feeds signal? I have some doubts...

New sounds can be easy to slot into the existing regime of genres. So even a wildly original effect is probably going to fall into a predefined basket of sorts.

We're somewhat restricted in how we can treat or mangle an electrical signal that represents "information" within the range of hearing.

I would say normally the innovation comes from use cases, rather than audio effects.

This. I think we've got a huge expanse of ground that's yet to be covered, but it's simultaneously going to be incredibly easy to just slot a distorting effect into the distortion class of effect - even if the results are new. I don't think it's a bad thing, so long as we do not fall into lazy thinking.

I have seen people on the internet indicate that all the circuits for say, distortion, have been cast, and everything is derivative, and I can assure you that is a simpleton's misunderstanding of the universe at large.

[Hobbes96]

I have a hard time imagining a truly new effect, but I think there's a lot of room for pedal manufactures to expand. I'd really like to see a pedal that can seamlessly load VSTs and use pitch tracking to play them using a standard 1/4 inch ins, which I think is getting more and more feasible as computing power gets more and more affordable. Along those lines, I'd think it'd be really cool to see a pedal that more or less does what Abelton's Corpus does on guitar, with some really tweakable midi controls.

I'd also really like to see a pedal that let you map individual samples to each fret. Right now, I'm using a Roland GK pickup -> GR-30 -> Korg Microsampler to do so, then back into my board with a looper and it'd be really nice to have an in-depth pedal that could do that more simply. Here's what I'm doing with that, but it's super convoluted. As an aside, I can't believe there isn't a Korg Microsampler v2 or comparable keyboard sampler on the market right now. Korg completely abandoned the original one, so I dont have a way to run the sample editor. In addition to running on abandonware, it doesn't have expandable memory and doesn't have ADSR controls (a feature that the fucking Casio SK-1 does), despite being the best option to my knowledge.

[John]

What's folks' thoughts on SynthGPT? What if you could get something like that in a pedal, with voice recognition so you can just shout at it "Hey Alexa, make my bass sound warm and punchy with lots of zanggg and a little queef"

[Blackened Soul]

Honesty? That sounds horribly sad and boring…. Sorry

[D.o.S.]

I would say normally the innovation comes from use cases, rather than audio effects.

See: Entombed and the HM-2. Dubstep and detuned sine waves. T-Pain and Vocoder/Autotune. Electric Wizard and the FZ-2. Sunn and boosted Rats. Remember the PLL convo around the Schumann PLL pedal (the "you can't just build a PLL" guy who posted here lives in my head to this day)?

If you have ideas, you'll find ways to make the gear do what you want. If people like your ideas, they'll flock to the gear you used to do it. The more people do that, the more companies will be incentivised to explore avenues like that.

I agree, but those innovators haven't inspired the companies to create new effects, just signature and custom shop models of already existing gear. So if some Gen Alpha kids start a really popular band that prominently features some bit of gear, no matter how innovative those kids are the technological development will only be around encapsulating that sound in a marketable product. I guess that happened when studio bands first started messing with tape flanging, phasing and delay, which led to the pedal versions of these things, so as you said the innovation is in the use, not the tools themselves. Maybe that means that the next new effect will come from someone bastardizing an as-yet unexplored bit of tech. Just thinking out loud here but I guess we should look at things that have been ignored.

For example, I don't know if anyone else has done this but I use my guitar to trigger a v-drum module. I run it through delays and a matrix of bypass pedals and I can instantly create blast beats from my riffs - here's a quick video clip: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0pEFX17KmJg . There are already drum trigger systems that play samples and do other MIDI things, and I think the future might look more like this.

Yeah I remember you showing us your drum trigger pedalboard a few years ago and being absolutely flummoxed. Was way beyond me on first glance


I think LLMs, controversially, are great for democratising synth ideas - all of these things can be really interesting if you have good prompts, which are, basically good ideas, and to some degree I don't think that actioning good ideas shouldn't just be for people who can afford to action them. But I basically have no hope that this will operate along those sorts of good faith lines and there are already so many problems with people trying to make good art and some money from it anyway.

[Warpsmasher]

What's folks' thoughts on SynthGPT? What if you could get something like that in a pedal, with voice recognition so you can just shout at it "Hey Alexa, make my bass sound warm and punchy with lots of zanggg and a little queef"

It's inevitable that the tech will eventually be in music gear and software - it's already in the current versions of Ableton and Photoshop. End use parameters will have to be determined by the manufacturers of course.

[friendship]

What's folks' thoughts on SynthGPT? What if you could get something like that in a pedal, with voice recognition so you can just shout at it "Hey Alexa, make my bass sound warm and punchy with lots of zanggg and a little queef"

Maybe (re: probably) I don't fully understand what SynthGPT does, but in practical application terms it doesn't sound that different than relying on a manufacturer's presets. If you like the manufacturer's interpretation of what a "warm and punch with lots of zanggg and a little queef" bass sounds like, then I'm sure that's helpful to the budding producer. In my experience, only in rare cases was a preset ever close to what I wanted, and even then I had to tweak it to truly get there, which meant that even for this use case I still had to know how a synth worked and how to get the sounds I wanted.

I soon realized that learning how synths work and spending time programming them myself ended up being faster, more fun, and often lead to cooler sounds than the tedious process of scrolling through presets until I got something "close enough" did. I guess submitting a prompt cuts down on preset-scrolling tedium, but you're still left with what a programmer/manufacturer decided was cool. Personally, I like learning new things and I like spending time developing sounds that I like. That process of exploration is, for me, the whole point. You can replace "synth" as the subject here for anything else--drum machines, effects, even writing/composition--the idea of downloading a fucking "chord pack" and dumping it onto a SynthGPT generated synth patch sounds more boring than balancing my household budget on a spreadsheet.

To be clear, I'm not unequivocally against using presets and not against taking shortcuts if you need/want to. It's just that a lot of the discussion around AI has left me to consider that there are, broadly, two attitudes towards creativity:

1. The end result of a creative process isn't as important as the inherently enriching, exciting process of creating it.
2. The discovery process of creativity is an obstacle and maybe even a nuisance, and anything that helps to churn out as much Content as possible is a benefit.

And the prevalence of attitude #2 is very depressing to me.

[dubkitty]

i think there are several ways to look at this question:

1. looking at the variety of wave-mangling options available in synthesis and sound design, what would be useable that hasn't been made into a pedal yet?

2. what features could be added to existing types of effects to make them significantly different? i'm thinking of things like shimmer reverb, modulated/filtered fuzz, and through-zero flanging.

3. what types of effects could be combined? shimmer is also an example here in that it's a pitch shift.

i personally have no idea what might come next...i long since quit understanding what makes things go weeeeee.

[Warpsmasher]

AI, create me an amplitude modulated formant filter distortion with voice settings from the entire cast of Conan the Barbarian.

this is a kōan.

I really want a Mako Stomp now. Best growls ever.

[dub]

I think we'll see more plugins making their way to hardware, or in live implementation that won't require a laptop on stage, now that guitarists are no longer scared of digital and modelers rule the roost.

I'd love some cool ways to blend samples and a guitar signal like Mick Gordon did with the chainsaw sound, or a live version of Aphex Twin's samplebrain tool.

[Seance]

Well, we had the fart and cat pedals recently. Not new tech, but I suppose new sounds.

New cat fart pedal on its way......

[K2000]

What's folks' thoughts on SynthGPT? What if you could get something like that in a pedal, with voice recognition so you can just shout at it "Hey Alexa, make my bass sound warm and punchy with lots of zanggg and a little queef"

Honesty? That sounds horribly sad and boring…. Sorry

I dunno, I think it potentially sounds pretty good (if the modeling works). You could request Mel Schacher's bass sound from the Grand Funk "Live" album and not have to first flip 27 dirt pedals that don't quite nail the sound. I don't use Alexa but besides that, being able to recreate specific toanz which have been chased since the beginning of time sounds like a potentially huge advance. Currently, you could have all the same gear but not quite get there because you're not recording your instrument into the same equipment at the same settings. There should be a way to account for the original mic placement, size of the room, etc. Maybe AI would be it.

Also, haven't there been a lot of innovations in effects pedals in the last 10 years? I think so. There's an entire new category of pedals - Glitch - and most of the pedals do something different and unique. The Malekko Charlie Foxtrot sounds different than the Count to 5 which sounds different than the Judder (etc). Not recent enough? When do folks estimate this category of effect was launched? Was the Boss Slicer in this category?

[Blackened Soul]

To play/be devils advocate…

How is glitch a new type of effect? You mean pedals and plugins that achieve sounds on industrial/electronic music from the 70s-80s& 90s? That is just repackaging for the unimaginative and lazy…

How is recreating a sound from an old recording innovative?

How is getting a ai to mix up a bunch of aspects of old sounds in different ways new?

Isn’t that just lazy unimaginative midwit boring ass crap?

If there is ever going to be a “new” effect… it will happen like all effects have.. by accident. . .

[John]

If there is ever going to be a “new” effect… it will happen like all effects have.. by accident. . .

A pedal that plays the wrong note? I guess arpeggiators, choruses set to "seasick" and unwittingly-stepped-on Whammy pedals will do that.

How about a pedal that turns your blues notes into jazz notes and vice-versa? What if a pedal could predict the next note you're going to play?

[Blackened Soul]

Or you could play Michael Jackson licks and have them come out as scat lines in Bill Cosby’s voice