Bellyheart wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2025 2:09 pm
It's like video demos are becoming a genre of music and pedals are designed to fit the style but live no one gives af.
This!
In these videos, the performance always begins with a musical instrument of some kind, whether it’s a guitar, a synth, or a noise box. Over time, it transitions into pure knob manipulation. To produce even half of the meaningful sounds demonstrated, the pedal often needs to be extensively adjusted manually. Don’t get me wrong — I think that’s fantastic. The pedalboard becomes an extension of the creative process, which is exactly what I want.
However, I find the form factor and user interface are poorly suited for this purpose. Useful functions and options are crammed into small enclosures, forcing musicians to navigate through switches, presets, and other hurdles just to achieve the desired result. The effort required to produce an acceptable outcome is excessive. I feel like this not only affects what I want to play but also forces me to limit the complexity of what I create with the instrument to interact with the pedal’s interface. Ultimately, many of us end up layering sounds and creating soundscapes. While this is an accomplishment and can be rewarding or even the primary objective, it often feels like a compromise to me. In my case, I resort to it because managing more intricate parts while performing advanced pedal manipulations becomes almost unfeasible.
For example, I’ve been experimenting with the CB Mood 2 recently. Last weekend, out of sheer frustration, I began developing a Python-based MIDI interface to control it. The issue is that when I adjust knobs A, B, C or D at varying intervals during a performance, I practically need to annotate those movements on a separate tab. Which knob did I move? When exactly did I move it? By how much did I move it by and in which direction? It’s now as if I’m writing a new line of instructions just to keep track of what I’m doing with the pedalboard.
I’m not sure if we’ll see groundbreaking new effects from an audio treatment perspective anytime soon, but I hope pedal manufacturers start paying more attention to how we interact with their products. The balance between the possibilities their pedals offer and the practicality of harnessing those possibilities is way off. Pedal interfaces have seen little evolution over time. Some of today’s pedals are light-years ahead of a basic Solasound overdrive in terms of functionality, yet their interfaces remain strikingly similar.
There are numerous pedals and effects I already own that I feel I’m vastly underutilizing because of these design shortcomings. This isn’t even touching on the high cognitive load and the frequent need to relearn each pedal’s quirks or deal with their lack of intuitiveness. If I were to suggest where research and development should focus, it would be on improving these interfaces, not on introducing yet another effect I’ll likely underutilize.
