I love the addition of Audio Processing independent of pedalboard changes, and can particularly understand why you’ve added a noise gate, but the next most useful item for me would be some master E.Q.
This would be SO useful for travelling musicians, who just travel with the Mod and their instrument and have to plug-in to a wild assortment of amps and PA systems. There are a whole load of reasons why you may not be able to alter the e.q. further down the chain (e.g. you’re using someone else’s amp and they’ve told you not to touch it, you’re DI-ing into a desk and they have limited/no e.q. for the foldback, or no-one able/willing to adjust it for you).
In our experiments with using the Dwarf “in the wild” this has been one of the biggest frustrations and (alongside not being able to assign parameters directly from the device, which I know is going to be fixed) has been a showstopper for us for this being used as the main workhorse for small gigs.
Ideally it would be a 5-band e.g. with Low shelf, high-shelf and a couple of parametric bands, but something simpler would be better than nothing!
I’m hoping that now the concept of audio processing is there, adding e.g. wouldn’t be too much extra effort?
Having thought about it a bit more, I’ve an idea that could save on a lot of UI design and make it even more powerful:
It would be great if you could assign a pedalboard to the pre and/or post processing stages.
UI-wise, it would mean you’d only need a simple selector to do it from the unit itself, and in the Web UI you could just design the pedalboard using the usual designer.
In terms of DSP, it would route the audio and midi through the “pre” board (if assigned), then into the main pedalboard then through the “post” board.
This would allow us to have any effects we liked - compression, e.q., amp sims etc in the “Master” sections, and these would stay in place while the main pedalboard was changed in the normal way.
A great use case for me would be the scenario I painted before, where a musician is moving between venues and sometimes plugging into an amp and other times into the PA directly. They could stick an amp and cab sim in a pedalboard in the “post” stage and just switch this on when they’re D.I.-ing into the desk, turning it off when they’re plugging into an amp.
I could imagine it might also be useful for people doing, say, MIDI, where they always need a certain amount of interfacing, mapping etc to their hardware - this could all be done in the “pre” pedalboard, giving a more flexible and simplified main pedalboard to work with.
Hope that makes sense? Would be interesting to know what you think and how feasible it would be in terms of hooking up the DSP side.
as @danmh says here I thought exactly the same. I guess the Blocks concept was not really thought for this, but this is certainly a use case that fits and maybe in an upgraded version it can get something on the device itself as currently is the Noise Gate and the Compression.
I’ve not seen any detail about blocks (my understanding is it’s a way of building a pedalboard on the device itself? If so, that would be excellent) - certainly sounds interesting and all the better if it can be leveraged to do the pre/post processing too!
