In 2004, I befriended a local engineer, because I wanted someone to teach me about pedal-building. I posed him this question, and he worked on it various ways. At some point, he suggested converting sound into light and then back into sound. We didn't have the funds to test this idea the way he wanted to implement it, but fast-forward several years and you have pedals like the Gamechanger Plasma and the Gamechanger Light Pedal reverb. So does that mean there are ideas for newish effects out there, but they're just not being built? (are the world's best engineers too busy with nuclear fission to give us the effects we crave?)
I have multiple lists of experimental pedal ideas, that involve all kinds of different approaches, but my concern is that no matter how weird the idea is, it may just end up circling back around to something that already exists (modulation, delay/reverb, fidelity, dirt).
As far as soundpainting goes, I don't need a
new effect to make new sounds---I can easily combine things that already exist to create interesting colors and textures. As someone with hundreds of plugins and pedals, I can conjure up a sound that's never been heard before anytime I want. I just have to load a drum machine or synth into the DAW and start stacking plugins---in 3-5 minutes, I'll have sweeping delays, splattered modulations, exotic resonances, and all kinds of cinematic colorations.
...do people consider the Miku a new effect? What about the Meowdulator? Or are these just considered synth effects that are far behind the pioneering products like the Roland GR series?
https://shop.bsmusicshop.com/the-meowdulaor.html
In the world of motion picture sound, people have to create new sounds all the time (spaceships, otherwordly animals, monsters). If someone stacked a bunch of found sounds with effects and then presented it as a tubonicasaurus pedal, would that be considered new, or is it just another Miku/GR with a different timbre?
A question I would pose: do people expect/want a new effect, or a whole new genre? Ex: no pedal maker is building a spectral arpeggiator, no one is building a self-oscillating sequenced flanger with an FX loop (UFO, ambulance sounds ahead). I feel like there's a lot that can be done without reinventing the wheel. It's kind of like the chef mentality---you don't know what you'll get until you combine existing ingredients in untapped ways. You don't have to climb a mountain in search of undiscovered herbs, when you can just combine stuff that other people wouldn't considere melting together.
