Ever since Jimi Hendrix brought guitar distortion to the forefront of rock and roll, pedals to control the distortion have been a standard piece of equipment for almost every guitarist. Now, there are individual analog pedals for each effect or even digital pedals that have banks of effects programmed in. Distortion is just one of many effects, and if you’ve built your own set of pedals for each of these, you might end up with something like [Brian]: a modular guitar pedal rack.

Taking inspiration from modular synthesizers, [Brian] built a rack out of wood to house the pedal modules. The rack uses 16U rack rails as a standard, with 3U Eurorack brackets. It looks like there’s space for 16 custom-built effects pedals to fit into the rack, and [Brian] can switch them out at will with a foot switch. Everything is tied together with MIDI and is programmed in Helix. The end result looks very polished, and helped [Brian] eliminate his rat’s nest of cables that was lying around before he built his effects rack.

MIDI is an extremely useful protocol for musicians and, despite being around since the ’80s, doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. If you want to get into it yourself, there are all kinds of ways that you can explore the studio space, even if you play an instrument that doesn’t typically use MIDI.

This a screenshot taken from [Pierre's] demonstration of an electric guitar effects pedal combined with DSP and Pure Data. He pulls this off by connecting the guitar directly to the computer, then feeds the computer’s audio output to the guitar amp.

The foot controls include a pedal and eight buttons, all monitored by an Arduino. Pure Data, a visual programming language, interprets the input coming from the Arduino over USB and alters the incoming audio using digital signal processing. [Pierre] manages the audio connection using the JACK Audio Connection Kit software package.

In the video after the break he’s using a laptop for most of the work, but he has also managed to pull this off with a Raspberry Pi. There’s no audio input on the RPi board, but he’s been using a USB sound card anyway. The other USB port connects the Arduino and he’s in business.

[Thanks Walter]

Amanda Ghassaei made a vocal effects box that digitizes the human voice using the granular synthesis function on Arduino. Audio comes in at 40khz, is digitized, then outputted in 8 bit sound.

Melodies sung are distinct in both tone and timbre, as evidenced by the Somewhere Over the Grainbow sample track. But the granular synthesis introduces it’s own distinct tonal characteristics to change the sound as it’s being digitized. The result could easily be blended into your favorite electronic tracks.

Amanda posted an Instructable on the project, including steps on how to create the handsome triangular enclosure she made.

[via The Arduino Blog]

Have you ever wished to build a box to distort and pitch your voice? Here we go.

Amanda Ghassaei has published an inspiring Instructable to guide you in building an Arduino Vocal Effects Box.

It samples an incoming microphone signal at a rate of about 40kHz, manipulates the audio digitally, and then outputs 8 bit audio at a rate of about 40kHz. Here you can hear a sample of the sounds that can be obtained.

I highly recommend to follow Amanda’s website because it seems that she is working on other experiments with digital signal processing using Arduino.

Pierre Massat is sharing his experience in building a guitar multi-effect on his blog. The project is based on a pedal built hooked up to an Arduino Uno and a PC running Pure Data.

In the blog you’ll find posts about :

• How to build a DIY foot controller
• How to set up a computer to process the sound of a guitar in real-time
• How to make simple effects in Pure Data
• How to let the foot controller and Pure Data talk to each other

I really liked the mechanism built with Lego!

GuitarExtended is a multi-effects system that can digitally alter the sound of a guitar using PD. The user has a box with multiple switches on it that change the alteration to the sound, and the variables of that sound are controlled using a homemade expression pedal with the help of Arduino.

One of the differences in this setup as opposed to other similar examples, is that the resulting tone is sweet and lyrical, as opposed to gritty and bit-smashed. Check out GuitarExtended’s site for more info and documentation.

More:

• Collin’s Lab: Guitar Pedal Modding with Arduino
• Arduino Guitar Effects
• DIY Guitar Looper