I used to take great delight in hacking old guitar stomp boxes to make them create weird noises. Replacing resisters and pots, soldering in new connections where there were none previously, etc. I was blissfully ignorant when it came to electronics, and as often as not I’d screw it up and have to un-hack it to get it working again, but on the occasions when it worked and came out with delightfully messed-up noises, man, I knew I’d be walking into the next band practice with a killer new toy to show my mates.
Fast forward a bunch of years, and I still enjoy making boxes to emit odd noises from my guitar, just they are all virtual. VST development is a bunch of fun, don’t get me wrong, but I do sometimes miss the tactile element. Nothing compares to stepping on that pedal at a climactic moment of a song and unleashing all that beautiful noise.
So Line 6’s Tonecore DSP Developer Kit looks really interesting. It’s basically the same modular stompbox they use in their normal pedals, but with a USB port and requisite PC software to write your own DSP code and download it to the stompbox. Step 1, hack code to screw up the incoming audio into whatever delightful cacophony you like. Step 2, dump down to stompbox. Step 3, get the girl, kill the baddie and be king of band practice again. Ok, so Step 3 probably needs some more work, but still, I’m so buying one of these. Check out the video below.
If you can’t see the video above, try here.
In the video he says it’ll be available in "the Summer", which is my Winter, and it’s Autumn here already, so here’s hoping they don’t slip. I wonder if you can pre-order?
Also, what a cool way to get kids who only want to play guitar into programming.
