Endless Pedal: the future is coming

Alan W

Alan W

Well-known member
polyend.com

Endless • Polyend

polyend.com polyend.com

Certainly has my curiosity, but not in a consumerist way. I mean, this is a pretty obvious direction for things to take. Pedals, amps, recoding interfaces. You can just tell them what to do. What could go wrong?

On the other hand, parts of it are slick. Three knobs seems too miserly though; but then,, for most of my pedals, once I get basic set ups done, I tend to just tweak one or two settings to vary things, so with this system, you could get everything zoned in and then have the controls be just those parameters.
 
I can't stand tweaking my pedals tbh. I just want them to sound good with the knobs at noon and then I can get a bit more or less of whatever they control. The market is too saturated, there is no need for pedals to be versatile. I would never invest the time to go to the computer and download a new patch and sit there and try to tweak it.

What I would do is make my pedal in a range that's directed at different audiences and make them more affordable, so a customer can buy 3 of them for the price of one of those. Or 3 people could each buy 1. Maybe I just want there to be less tech in things
 
There is a lot to be said about honing your craft and being prepared (or not) for any musical situation that you may come across, and ultimately being prepared for. There is beauty in being unprepared as well. If you really want to have a unique human experience with any sort of art, you need your own set of knowledge to give your input instead of being a weak pastiche of scraped together data.

AI is rendering us into thoughtless simpletons with no grasp on any sort of basic concept that requires further exploration. I hate it, and I will resist it with every fibre of my being. Fuck all of it. No.

“googling” something to learn an answer instead of doing your own trial and error is bad enough depending on your sources, but now people seem to be taking AI answers as the rule of law without a second thought. That is fucked up and I will not equivocate or give an inch on that subject.


(TLDR: analog guy is mad at fast paced digital tech that is destroying the world)

I will resist this future forever. 🖕
 
I would imagine that there will always curmudgeonly types like me who refuse to take the easy road and insist on actually knowing what is going on inside their gear. Well, ok, in my case it is an educated guess. If everything was as easy as just telling a computer what to do I would get bored out of my mind! I definitely do not want to live in a world without challenges.

I wish the AI geeks would keep AI for the things where it could help peoples lives, like in medicine and safety. I wish they would keep AI OUT of the arts and creativity. It will result in the blandification of everything creative. AI can't come up with new - not really new. It can only steal what has already been done and kind of average it out. And yes, that's what a lot of people do already but at least it's human judgement, not some computer's.
 
Oh, I knew my people! I saw this article, that linked the company, and it’s like a little window to yet another bleak future. Davy plugs his guitar in, oh wait! It’s Bluetooth. His “amp” knows he’s in the vicinity, with a guitar. “Did you want to play?” “Yeah. Something bluesy, with a bit of wah”
“0h, I suggest late middle era Cream” “sure, whatever” (starts to noodle)
“Um, your second and third strings are a bit flat, do you want me to fix that?”
 
HamishR said:
I wish the AI geeks would keep AI for the things where it could help peoples lives, like in medicine and safety. I wish they would keep AI OUT of the arts
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I’m hopeful that the proliferation of AI art, and things like music produced with heavy handed use of AI tools could eventually drive a reactive demand for “human art” the way the Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to the proliferation of manufactured goods and drove a demand for hand made things.

Hopefully the reaction will be so strong that people will demand guitar playing so full of human flaws there’s no way it could come from a computer. My time to shine.
 
Nostradoomus said:
There is a lot to be said about honing your craft and being prepared (or not) for any musical situation that you may come across, and ultimately being prepared for. There is beauty in being unprepared as well. If you really want to have a unique human experience with any sort of art, you need your own set of knowledge to give your input instead of being a weak pastiche of scraped together data.

AI is rendering us into thoughtless simpletons with no grasp on any sort of basic concept that requires further exploration. I hate it, and I will resist it with every fibre of my being. Fuck all of it. No.

“googling” something to learn an answer instead of doing your own trial and error is bad enough depending on your sources, but now people seem to be taking AI answers as the rule of law without a second thought. That is fucked up and I will not equivocate or give an inch on that subject.


(TLDR: analog guy is mad at fast paced digital tech that is destroying the world)

I will resist this future forever. 🖕
Click to expand...
💯 well said.
 
The one thing I think is cool about this is they have an SDK for their platform on github:

github.com

GitHub - polyend/FxPatchSDK: Software Development Kit for Polyend Endless

Software Development Kit for Polyend Endless. Contribute to polyend/FxPatchSDK development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

Having access to view and modify the source code is quite nice. But, I may as well take it one step further and use a more open hardware design, FV-1 or Daisy based.

It could be appealing to musicians that are comfortable with programming but not pedal building.

The thing with the AI is I don’t like the black box aspect of it, combined with a technology that produces indeterminate results. That’s besides the decimation of the world’s fresh water supplies, absurd power consumption, hijacking access to purchase RAM for personal computers, building vast quantities of GPUs that constantly get tossed and replaced, and a global economy that is sitting on stilts, based on an alternative reality of this stuff actually being profitable.
 
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Nostradoomus said:
There is a lot to be said about honing your craft and being prepared (or not) for any musical situation that you may come across, and ultimately being prepared for.
Click to expand...
The idea that we should all have pedals or guitars to cover any musical situation is something we've been brainwashed to think. It's a consumerist notion that supports the companies trying to sell us products that solve the problem they've told us we have. It's the same story as the firefighter who starts fires so he can put them out.

The studio musicians of the golden age didn't have any of this. We should stop being derivative and focus on being creative.
 
Change is constant. Not always for the better.

I don't think AI will ever be able to nail the subtle nuances of a person's creative touch on an acoustic instrument.
 
dcfvgb said:
Change is constant. Not always for the better.

I don't think AI will ever be able to nail the subtle nuances of a person's creative touch on an acoustic instrument.
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I wonder if we're any happier now than we were fifty years ago? I remember as a kid seeing documentaries about the rise of computing and how it would free humans up from mundane tasks and allow us all to have more leisure time. Yeah, that really worked out! More and more I think just because you can doesn't mean you should. We rush to use new technology every time without pause to think "Is this better than what we had before?"

I'm really starting to sound like a grumpy old man! I love the internet and being able to learn about electronics and make my own stuff, but the rise of hate and social media (not necessarily unrelated) is not a welcome change. Technology has actually made us work longer hours rather than shorter. We get contacted by work outside of work hours - although laws are slowly catching up.

AI can imitate art but it can't create it. Do we really want AI in the arts? Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
 
falco_femoralis said:
The idea that we should all have pedals or guitars to cover any musical situation is something we've been brainwashed to think. It's a consumerist notion that supports the companies trying to sell us products that solve the problem they've told us we have. It's the same story as the firefighter who starts fires so he can put them out.

The studio musicians of the golden age didn't have any of this. We should stop being derivative and focus on being creative.
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That was the caveat of (or not) 😂 but agreed.
 
Harry Klippton said:
Just cuz they made it doesn't mean it's gonna take off
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I agree, but I also fear that it will soon be first among many. This seems like part of a long slide into complacency and lack of curiousity—like the animators in Wall-e (?) pretty much predicted. Sure, there will be pockets of resistance, people still wanting to understand the guts of things, but I think a thriving society needs this to be a dominant trait, not an outlier.
 
Yeah, I guess it depends on how far you want to go with it. I was attending a session at a conservatory where they were talking about the use of presets while composing. Does the preset help the composer make progress and keep the burden of decision making manageable? Or does the preset end up being ‘good enough’, and prevent the artist from creating exactly what they envisioned? Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

To me, having a prompt-generated effect is not that much different using a preset. You’re using parameters created by something/someone else. The main difference is one is incredibly lame. You may as well make the generated effect an NFT while you’re at it.
 
The thing that drives me crazy about AI is that tech companies are currently throwing things at the wall to see what stick. But they have not yet figured out how to monetize the darn thing. Eventually when they do, we will be presented with a bill. Be it a subscription fee or some other way to extract more data from users, who knows! But this stuff is really expensive and it won’t be cheap for much longer. Don’t let it become indispensable or we are gonna get stuck with another steaming pile of garbage that we can’t get rid of.
 
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