This isn’t my idea, but more of a request from bassists I’ve ran into. I don’t play bass, but apparently the pedals and amps for bass assume that a bassist is going to play only in the lower range, when there are some bass instruments that have a much wider range. Think about things like 5 and 6 string bass guitars that can actually play the entire spectrum of sound.
The simplest idea then for a bass guitarist is to create sound equipment that can handle all the notes they can play. Now, admittedly this is probably just a bassist having a fetish for sounds he probably will never ever use, but it would make for a great selling point for equipment.
Specifically though, when it comes to distortion, the key is that you don’t “ruin the tone”. Musicians really love this word “tone”, but I’ve found it kind of means this:
If you play Jazz with a Metal Muff Super Distortion pedal, then I will not like your tone. If you play Jazz with a Gibson through a JazzKat Amp, then I will like your tone.
However, with bass, tone and intonation are very important because you can barely hear them in most modern music anyway, especially rock. They work very hard to make sure they are heard and that what they play fits the music, so if you make a distortion pedal it can’t screw that up. In fact, I would say that a graphical equalizer style of fuzz pedal would be the best.
This idea is really simple: Do to the whole “pedals industry” what the IBM PC did to the “computer industry” by making a single pedal that can be reprogrammed. The key to this is that you make a few pedals in various forms (with maybe a DIY kit style for the hax0rs) and then the buyer can simply buy 5 of them, and download software into them to make them do their thing.
The idea here is that you can make a generic pedal that has all the basic features:
Then make the internals contain some memory, a good DSP chip like a dsPIC or a TI, and a very basic little operating system on it.
With this you’d have a generic pedal that you can mass produce for dirt cheap all over the world. They could be made more robust because they’d be simpler, and you’d only need to make maybe 3-5 models to cover various ranges of needs. For example, stereo input and output could be one pedal, mono could be another, larger RAM storage, etc.
Finally, the key to this pedal is a very easy yet efficient way to program it with DSP processing effects and logic. If you were brave you’d get some FORTH genius to code up the sweetest “pedal DSP processing” DSL on the planet, but then you’d tell people it was FORTH and they’d scoff at you. However you do it, the idea is the musician might not code it, but they could go to an “App Store For Pedals”, pay $5 for the best Hall Reverb there is, load it on the pedal, and then go.
For controls you can actually get away with the following in various combinations:
With just these components you can arrange them in various combinations for different products. Say in a small form factor you only have X,Y knobs and stomp buttons, but nothing else for the controls. In the “Cadillac” versions, you could have beefier internals and banks of these controls.
The point however, is that you stop manufacturing hardware that’s different for every application, and instead commoditize the hardware so you can open up the market on the software side.
Also, because I want to fucking hack my pedals but I don’t have time to solder shit together.
For the ultimate in the above idea, you’d make the pedals so that they had no moving parts, or at least minimal parts. If you used pressure sensing capacitors and conductive plates you could replace the stomp buttons with a flat surface that’s just stomped on. There’s one vendor that did a wah pedal this way (who I can’t remember) and it works pretty damn well.
If you could do this in a way where the boxes were nearly indestructible, and then people could load software on them easily, well then you could charge more because people would know they only needed to buy a few for the rest of their career.
At least until they break them in that special way users know how to break the unbreakable.
I went into a store recently to buy a “Big Metal Muff Nano” and the girl pulling it out of the display case just couldn’t stop with the fucking jokes. She was using it as a phone, cracking on the 'muff’ in the name. I swear she was a 12 y/o boy, but I’m not annoyed with her, I’m annoyed with all pedal manufacturers and how they design their pedals.
The vast majority of them have stupid juvenile names, idiotic colors, cartoon graphics on them, and are really embarrassing for a grown man to buy. When you’ve gone into a music store and actually avoided buying a pedal because it was called “Super Muff Destroyer Mega Tron Q-Force 9000” you know there’s a problem.
Seriously, if you start making pedals, fucking name them with just simple direct names for what they do, and make them either an array of colors or just one color. Don’t waste my time and pride on your dumb jokes about pussy.
I’ve been getting into using a loop back pedal to build up songs and just fuck around, and it’s great, but the interface to these things is horrendous. The one I have is the BOSS RC-2 and it’s pretty decent. You turn a dial to one of the various record settings, punch down on the pedal with your foot, and start playing. It figures out your phrase length, adjusts for the rhythm, and then loops it right away.
Where these pedals break down is when you have to put the rhythm into them. First, their built-in beats sound kind of like crap, but you’re not using them for the beats. However since the devices will use a rhythm you tap into their tiny little rhythm tap button, you do need to reach down and push on them to make them work well. Other models will let you use your foot to tap the rhythm, but seriously, if I want to put a dead accurate rhythm into a pedal, I want to use my right hand. It’s what does the rhythm.
Obviously this problem calls for an engineering solution. I propose that these pedals come with a little remote that can be surface mounted somewhere on the guitar, or just held in the hand. It wouldn’t have to be bigger than most of the Apple remotes that seem to litter my apartment, and it would be way easier than a damn button deep in the bowels of the looper.
If I’ve got a remote though, and I don’t surface mount it, well then you can be smart and make it shaped like a shaker and have a force sensor built in so that I can shake out the rhythm I want before I start. Imagine a little thing the size of an egg with some buttons on the bigger end. I first hold the thing a like maraca and use the buttons to control the pedal to set it up. Maybe pick a rhythm, clear the last song, rewind, or set a phrase length. Then I flip that thing around and start shaking it to the beat I want. The pedal then can blink back at me to show that it’s got the beat, and then I can play perfectly in time. Maybe I can keep the shaker in my hand too.
That brings up the next option of putting it on a wrist band or a watch mount so that it just picks up the beat off my already moving arm. However, the danger with this is that the band might snag on the guitar while I’m playing. Scratch that, it will snag on my guitar so don’t do this. However, for other instruments it might be great.
Finally, the ultimate would be if this could just be a very thin touch pad I mount on my guitar to control the pedal. The only problem I see with this is that it’d have to be in an awkward place to keep it out of the way while I play. If the goal is to make it easy to setup a looper pedal from the guitar, then you could have it active only when a switch is flipped. If you did that then the touch buttons could be just about anywhere as long as they meshed with the guitar surface and didn’t interfere with playing.
If you’ve ever seen Reggie Watts perform (and you should because he is awesome) you might notice that he’s using a looper pedal with his hands. However, it looks like the damn thing has the same stomp buttons that a guitar pedal would have. What? Why the hell would a pedal designed for a vocalist have stomp buttons?
The reason is most of these pedals are geared for a guitarist even though they might be marketed for “vocals”. The rationale for the manufacturer is that if they put stomp buttons on the box then a guitarist will buy it so they can work it with their feet while they play.
For a vocalist this is about the dumbest thing ever. The buttons should be large, usable by hands, easy to push, and not made for feet. There should probably be a control on the microphone for the most common operation, maybe stopping the current record.
Most importantly they should be silent! If you watch the video of Reggie you’ll hear him pushing the buttons at the end of the song. He’s using a microphone, so of course it will pick up the button clicks. I mean, what the hell, don’t people who make these things actually watch musicians who use their products?
This is a project I actually intend to do eventually if someone doesn’t beat me to it. The other day I wanted to get a cheapo tuner pedal for when I play, but they’re all $100+ dollars. Then I was going by J&R and saw that they redid their music instruments store. I realized, “Hey! They might sell a shitty cheapo tuner pedal.” Sure enough, they sold these awesome Behringer Pedals that actually aren’t too bad.
The tuner I got was $30 and works just fine. It has only one design flaw that in it stays on constantly when it’s plugged in, so you need to jack it into some AC. Other than that it’s not bad, especially for $30. I blow that on coffee a week. Yes, I drink a lot of coffee.
However, these pedals are made of cheapo plastic, so they probably wouldn’t survive constant gigging.
Being made of plastic means they will survive being cracked open and hacked on. With the stomp boxes made out of die cast metal you’ll typically find the manufacturer doing some shoddy things like gluing parts down, not seating things right, or just making them a bitch to crack open and take apart. With a plastic pedal though you can easily take that thing apart and see what’s inside.
I cracked it open and its internals are fairly simple. It looks like Behringer is doing a lot of what I was suggesting by making the same platform with a few modifications and then reprogramming them. I haven’t delved into the chips they use, but they are composed of mostly just simple buttons and LED arrays, with 1/4” jacks for input/output. Even the stomp switch is just a hinge on a spring that when pressed shoves a long dongle down to touch a click button inside.
This got me thinking about buying a bunch of these little pedals, taking all the guts out, building a new casing for all of them, and then wiring them up inside a new shiny steel box as a sweet all enclosed multi-effects rig. The concept would simply be that you could potentially get a good number of these into a nice clean sleek housing and do away with all the various housings and a big ass useless pedal board.
Of course you’ll have to deal with power issues, and how to wire all the jacks in a series, but one idea I also had would be to make the routing configurable by some switches. With a few simple toggle switches you might be able to do up the wiring inside so that a flip of the switch just pulls a pedal out of the loop, or maybe moves it to the front. That kind of wiring could get really complex, but would be tons of fun.
The biggest win for these pedals and just hacking is that they are cheap. With a boutique pedal you might blow $200 or more and don’t dare touch them. With a $30 pedal you’ve just bought an evening of fun, so if you nuke it who cares?
I’ll post up some more of these as I go through my idea notebook. Most of the ideas I have for music I try to implement myself, but the stuff I know I’ll never get around to I like to throw out for other people to think about. Feel free to steal anything that’s not nailed down.