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Vibe a Guitar Pedal

polyend.com

31–36 of 36 posts

Re: Vibe a Guitar Pedal

#31
post #9

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.

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

Re: Vibe a Guitar Pedal

#32
post #3
post #2

This looks interesting. Would love to see if there are examples of pedals already vibe-coded.

I don't think that's what this is. 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…

Ah I see.

It is still cool though.

I'd LOVE to try it out, or see a demo in person.

My wishlist includes asking the platform to "generate a pedal that sounds like the lead guitar in Comfortably Numb" and it generates that.

I'd pay good $$$ for it.

(It might still not make a Gilmour out of me though :-( )

Re: Vibe a Guitar Pedal

#33

Could you even describe a typical guitar effect if it’s not something that already has a name? How would you describe a phaser?

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 :)

Re: Vibe a Guitar Pedal

#34
post #5

Very cool! Would love to know more about the audio processing backend that drives this type of thing

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).

https://clevelandmusicco.com/hothouse-diy-digital-signal-pro...

Re: Vibe a Guitar Pedal

#35
post #10

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.

Re: Vibe a Guitar Pedal

#36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doe…

I agree a good multi-effect is useful to learn what the different effects actually do, but there are good entry-level multi-effect pedals that are cheaper than that. And this pedal can only have one effect at a time. Also, it seems there's no preview in their AI playground, so you have to burn tokens and upload the effect to test it, and it may take lots of iterations to get what you want. So I think this could mainl…

Yeah i really don't see this in particular as a viable product the way it's presented, you're right on all counts.
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