the future is now, where's the cool shit?

[ChetMagongalo]

If you want something cool, you might have to make it yourself. It's not viable for companies to take risks on innovation if there isn't money in it. Especially for guitarists and pedals, which I would argue aren't "cool" anymore. You have to be creative to make a guitar sound cool and exciting these days, and for a lot of people, excitement and innovation in music is not the individual's bottom line.

It's not about the gear though, it's about the music, and people are always doing cool shit with music regardless of their gear and their mastery of cutting edge music technology or lack of it. I think the people who make the coolest music seem to really care the most, and most people don't care that much, most musicians are hobbyists.

The cool shit to me is that the tools to make music and play music are more affordable and widely available than ever before. If the same proportions of innovative and creative musicians have always existed, there is now more opportunity for them to flourish.

[D.o.S.]

Preach Based Chet.

[aens_wife]

Preach Based Chet.

[rfurtkamp]

The biggest problem is not in small builders though. It's the big builders who have the ability to do new things but chose not to because people will still buy the old stuff. Eventide for instance with the H9. Why did we all want one or most of us? It's not new. It's their existing pedals and algo's in one box, with some more features and less features in some respects. I'm actually surprised the H9 didn't flop after having one for so long. I find it annoying non user friendly. Who wants to control a pedal with their phone or pc? Not me. That's ridiculously annoying to me. Plus you have to spend hours to build it into what you want.

That's the price of depth coupled with compactness - you can't have simple and smallish without it.

The old innovative stuff in the last 20 years wasn't just put it down and rock, and for a lot of the really outre stuff, it never, ever, ever will be. That's a pipe dream that TC is catering to with the one preset one knob dumbed down for stupid.

Now the Deep Impact is being re-released and that dude has actually revamped the entire thing, so it's actually pretty innovative by today's standards. But for the most part, it's all a bunch of shit in the digital world. Which sucks.

Reissues aren't innovative these days in the slightest, even with a huge amount of rework IMO.

I don't like having to buy extra controls or spend hours just to get the most out of my pedal. I want to push a button, and be done. Source Audio actually IMO is the best innovators out there right now with this type of technology, but even they are going to the whole app scheme. I hate APPS!!! Fuck my phone!!! lol

Even the Source stuff now you have to use an app to do the real deep editing/setup, and they've taken a page from the TC for Morons camp (albeit with an at least external patch expansion, but that's more in the ''hard to set up" category).

I want something simple, yet mind blowing and complex.

I'm a needy bastard, I know.

Asking for the impossible.

Remember the old adage "Cheap, fast, or reliable? Pick two" or variants?

You're asking for things that won't go together. "Mind blowing and complex" isn't going to be simple in a pedal format. Best you can do is make a navigable, sensible app/PC interface for it that lessens some of the sting - Boss/Roland, Line6, etc have done a good job with that in making apps that are visual signal routing with virtual knobs and choices that are intuitive as they'll get.

And I don't have a problem with the H9 at all to be honest - by Eventide standards, it's an extreme budget box. If you want what the big, expensive rack stuff does without micropurchase, you'll be spending $2k+.

I think Tone God was onto something with his multi use fuzz pedal, but the implementation was all wrong. It was a great idea, but it just didn't work right.

If I had the extra cash, I'd bank roll the shit out of R&D in the digital world.

Best you'd realistically get are things with very large screens (which aren't conducive to fitting on a board/durability) and a lot of submenus to make that work.

[D.o.S.]

Rob what do you do with your lawn once you've got everyone off of it?

[rfurtkamp]

I POOP.

ALL THE FUCK OVER IT.

THEN ROLL AROUND IN IT.

[Inconuucl]

I POOP.

ALL THE FUCK OVER IT.

THEN ROLL AROUND IN IT.

So you're an old dog, I take it?

[rfurtkamp]

Old enough to remember the offset non-market before the grunge days and $100 '64 Mustangs everywhere.

[cloudscapes]

Look for Earthquaker and HEXE to do next-level granular shit soon, I'm hoping! And maybe a bit after, EHX.

EHX are kind of in a sweet spot creativity<->profitability right now. They're open enough to come up with weird shit every now and then (ring thing, ravish sitar, freeze & superego) but also big enough that they can supply the demand and make money off of it.

Granular is fucking hard to do, though. Out of reach of most builders-turned-companies unless you hire a DSP wizard on your team that can do both software and hardware. It often (not always, but often) involves a big investment of time & money, so to ensure a quick return, market and sell that 100% vintage sounding DSP verb. It'll do well, but won't necessarily appeal to the minority who look for weirder stuff. Not saying that's how it always works, but I'm guessing it's like that in a few cases.

Market difference even within weird efects fans can be tricky. Half of us want effects with a shit-ton of knobs and tweakability, and the other half want granular plug-and-play. Builders/designers look and that and scratch their heads and shrug. I don't know.

[Strange Tales]

I've been wanting to learn how to program chips using C++, honestly have no idea where to start though; even through a ton of googling and shit.

[multi_s]

well now that this has degraged into a granular circle jerk, has anyone played one of these?

http://eu.elektron.se/samplers/octatrack/

also re "new" ways of synthesis, i think the chances of coming up with somehting totally new is quite low, you might build something that hasn't been done exactly that way before, but somethign totally new conceptually is dificult. I didin't study music tech or sound processing directly so I'm not an expert, but most audio research now seems more like extracting meta data from songs or things like algorithms that determine how to best predict a playlist on youtube based on peoples litening habits, as opposed to actually altering/effecting/synthesizing sound directly. It's actually quite intereting, but not necesarioly someithing you are going to see in a guitar pedal anyrtime soon. Although hey maybe you could have a pedal you noodle into and it says, hey man seems like you would like these bands, or even try to connect you with other musicains via social media based on your style, or suggest tndr matches that correlate his/her listening preference to your local band etc.

[Gone Fission]

RE: app editors, I kind of don't mind except when I do. Some of my first forays into programming shit was synths using Opcode's Galaxy patch librarian, which was a world better than menu-diving on the hardware I was using, so it is a pretty natural system to me. The PC editor for the Yamaha Magicstomp is often handy and sometimes essential, like for the pages of parameters for the eight-tap delays. (I'd like a few months off just to get somewhat familiar with those algorithms.) But I need the system to work. The iOS Toneprint editor was dead for 8x for over a year before they updated it. I like a good editor, but I really fear abandonware, and tablet or phone OSes seem very likely to lead there. Which SNAMM thing was it with a browser-based editor? That could have some legs, maybe.

All the same, I would love an H9-style editor for my Eclipse.

[rfurtkamp]

Yea, I agree 100% on phone-based editors without some sort of PC backup/MIDI control option/LCD screen to at least offer an *option* to deep dive through menus 10 years from now.

Same reason I'm still enamored of hardware over software plugins - I know my venerable rack stuff will still work after the next Windows or iOS or Linux patch.

I also keep an extra drive installed in my PCs with a previous version so in the event that mission-critical hardware doesn't work, I can revert if I absolutely positively must use that app.

With Windows at least, the only "doesn't work any more" change across the board was when the went to WASAPI over Directsound only after XP (which was necessary, I admit, after 10 years of the same bloated stuff) - I hear horror stories from my Mac friends fairly regularly.

And I don't disagree about handy and essential in some cases for the full-on editors - the GR-55 was the last unit shipped by Roland without an editor proper, but thankfully the userbase built an elegant, functional one that allows you to do things that you can't with the actual unit (and programming it, especially by Roland standards, in the box alone is surprisingly pleasant and useful/straightforward).

You don't *have* to use the editor on it, if you select honky-tonk piano PCM, guess what it sounds like?

But you can edit to an obscene level, including some starter sounds for whatever basic guitarist/genre you're looking for and just scroll through the baseline. 95% of the time I don't need to edit the PCM synths much (but with two in the box, being able to is glorious, particularly for panning/routing in no time):



So it's *simple* as a unit like this can get, but also lets you dive deep if you so desire. Can't complain.

And if the USB ever doesn't work due to an update, the editor is open-source and runs on anything and accepts regular ol' MIDI.

Failing that, the screen is large and visible and almost everything is doable through the box itself (except the few things that the modders found while going through its source code and forcing parameters that weren't labelled)

That's as future-proof as it gets.

[resincum]

Although hey maybe you could have a pedal you noodle into and it says, hey man seems like you would like these bands, or even try to connect you with other musicains via social media based on your style, or suggest tndr matches that correlate his/her listening preference to your local band etc.

imagine

[aens_wife]

Look for Earthquaker and HEXE to do next-level granular shit soon, I'm hoping! And maybe a bit after, EHX.

EHX are kind of in a sweet spot creativity<->profitability right now. They're open enough to come up with weird shit every now and then (ring thing, ravish sitar, freeze & superego) but also big enough that they can supply the demand and make money off of it.

I dig Earthquaker, but I wouldn't look to them to shake up the foundations of sound manipulation. They just released an overdrive, an octave pedal with no knobs, and an amp.

EXH just did a Klon clone. They make cool shit sometimes, but even they are vulnerable to market changes. With all the new boutique builders out there, their bottom line must feel that, at least a little bit. If they weren't concerned about it, they wouldn't have released those small pedals.