The Endless AI guitar pedal has great potential

I’m not sure anyone was really asking for an AI guitar pedal. But it was inevitable that someone would build one. One of the first companies to make this decision was Polyend, a well-respected music equipment manufacturer with a reputation for creating distinctive, specialized equipment. The company built groove boxes around it Old school trackers And a multi-effects pedal you can do Step sequence. So there was at least some hope that if anyone could use an AI effect pedal properly, it would be Bolend.

Bolend Endless It is a $299 programmable guitar pedal powered by an ARM processor. It’s paired with Playground, a number of interconnected AI agents that turn any directed text into an effective guitar effect. If you have an idea, you don’t have to hope that someone has already built that pedal; You can simply ask him. Maybe there’s a specific set of effects you’ve always wanted, but no company sells them because there’s no demand for a combination/auto-tune loop modulator. I’m not convinced this is what guitarists crave, but it’s a well-intentioned first attempt to bridge an effect pedal with an LLM.

To be clear, AI is not actually that in Pedal. Instead, Polyend has trained a custom MBA to encode effects that you can then load into the pedal. You can also create the effects yourself using C++, but most people either download it for free Paintings (as Bolend calls influences) from the community website or ask them to log in stadium. You can also pay $20 for a physical interface board to pair with the downloaded effect.

Currently, the Plates gallery includes about 60 effects, most of which were developed by Polyend. They cover everything from simple saturators to tape loop simulators and guitar synthesizers. There are even self-playing drum machines. Some of my favorites include grunt (low octave down effect), and Infinite hall Hesitation, and card (variable pitch granular frequency). There too Stardusta massively granular combination of delay, reverb, and tremolo that’s hard to find anywhere else.

Polyend opens up the gallery to third-party contributions as well, so you can create an effect in Playground and submit it for consideration.

stadium It’s the reason most people look forward to Endless. It’s a web front-end for multiple AI agents working side by side, trained on Polyend’s effects library. Various AI components interpret the claims, define the effect algorithms, generate code based on those basic elements, and then validate that code to ensure it runs correctly without damaging the eardrum.

If you’ve used a chatbot before, the Playground web app should look familiar enough. Describe the effect you want and its controls (you have three knobs, plus short and long presses on the footswitch to work with them), and he’ll come back with two options for turning your idea into something practical.

In general, you have three options. You can just choose one and let Playground do its job. But you can also make modifications at this ideas stage, before you start creating any code, and more importantly, they cost you money.

Generating effects costs tokens. The pedal comes with 2000 tokens, and you can purchase more at $20 for 2000. That should be enough for some effects. The system is a bit opaque, but the more complex the effect, and the more iterations needed to get it right, the more expensive the tokens will be. A simple glitch might only cost you 20 tokens, but a precise iteration with rhythmically synchronized glitches might cost you 500 tokens.

What is likely to chew through your codes is not the original generation, but rather iteration to get what you want. Especially if what you’re looking for is balanced weirdness. Trying to get Polyend’s Playground to understand the appropriate resonance levels for your bandpass delay, or how much loop modulation you want in your punk fuzz, can be frustrating.

Polyend provided me with 10,000 tokens ($100 value) to rate Playground as part of this review. In total, I went through a little over 3,500 icons and got three effects that I enjoyed and a handful of duds. If I was paying for coins out of pocket, I might have been less inclined to keep repeating. Additionally, Playground can be slow to release code. Depending on the complexity of the effect, it may take anywhere from five to just over 10 minutes each time. Often times, I would get bored and give up after five or six tries if I didn’t get what I was looking for.

The impact that posed the most trouble was what the chatbot called “buzzing taps.” I ordered it for a “clean multi-click digital delay where the delay lines have narrow, high-bandwidth resonant filters with precise modulation.” The first version gave no control over delay feedback. When combined with resonant filters, they are almost always on the verge of self-oscillation. Incredibly unpleasant. Swapping the resonance control with the feedback knob didn’t help much.

Ultimately, after six generations, I tried to motivate this by describing the sound I was going for, rather than a specific set of influences. I wanted to “gently modulate the resonant sounds that follow the pitch of my guitar, almost like a string section.” Instead, I get what sounds like a 70s synthesizer having a nervous breakdown. It was fun, but not really what I was looking for. So after spending about $7 worth of tokens, I put that idea aside for something more immediately feasible, like a mysterious, broken piece CD skip effect.

And even that took some effort to coax him into life. My original request for “random stuttering and glitching” with the “click rhythm” and mix knob of the loop modulator was disappointing. Even at the slowest, the stuttering was machine gun-like and never felt rhythmic.

It took me six generations and specifically asking to lock the stutter on sixteenth, eighth, or quarter notes to get what I was looking for. Despite demanding that the level of ring modulation increase in each generation, it still feels a very subtle touch. However, I absolutely love the end result. It’s delightfully messy and dirty enough.

There are also a few quirks worth pointing out. Endless can only load one effect at a time. Uploading new files is simple enough – you just plug it via USB into your computer, it appears as an external drive, and you drag files to it. But, although the pedal automatically restarts after loading a new effect, most of them don’t seem to work properly until you turn them on manually by unplugging them. Likewise, you may need to manually eject Endless and then reconnect it to your computer before loading a new effect. This greatly slows down the iteration and testing process.

Obviously the sounds I’m trying to craft are complex, there are a lot of variables. But that’s kind of the point. There are a million and one digital pedals and fuzz delays that will do these things better than Endless ever will. If you just want the standard edition effects, you’ll be better off creating a small batch of cheap custom pedals rather than relying on AI. The only reason to get Endless is to try to create the effect of your dreams that doesn’t exist yet.

It is important to keep your expectations in check. Polyend’s Playground’s built-to-your-call effects will never compete with the precision programming of professional audio developers, or even dedicated hobbyists. The best thing Endless offers is experimenting with ideas you can develop faster, either by programming them directly in C++ for Endless, or on another platform like Max MSP or Pure Data. It’s unfortunate that Polyend won’t be revealing the raw code for the effects created in Playground for further tweaking.

You may be better off exploring some of these ideas on a standard guitar pedal such as Poly influences pepothe Effects of Empress Zoyaor even Eventide H90which allows you to combine basic elements to create effect patches. Now, these devices all cost a little more than the Endless, at $449, $549, and $899 respectively, but they also have thriving communities, stable firmware, and produce top-notch effects. I’d more likely spend an hour manually building an effect on my ZOIA than fighting with LLM.

Finally, and understandably, the AI ​​aspect may put some people off. But to Bolend’s credit, he seems to be making a good-faith effort to use AI as ethically as possible. In addition to building code only with effects developed internally or from open source components, the company also tries to offset its environmental impact. Some elements of Playground are implemented using external AI agents via the API, and there’s not much you can do about that. But founder Piotr Raczyński says Playground’s servers are on-site, not in some third-party data center; Bolend He says The servers are “almost 100% energy self-sufficient thanks to solar power and heat pumps.” They are essentially “free range and pastured” LLMs.

If you’re a die-hard opponent of AI, none of this will change how you feel about Endless. This is probably part of the reason why Polyend avoided using the phrase “AI” at all when it was announced. But if you’re more AI agnostic, or fully embrace the world of LLMs, this might ease the guilt you feel. The main advantage of Polyend Endless is that it is a cheap and easy way to create custom effects. If a large community grows up around it, As happened with ZOIAIt can be a great source of one-time experimental effects. but Looking the The world of music general I moved away For AI, this is a big “if.”