I was thinking about some of the things I struggle with pedalboard-wise and it got me thinking that a global pre- and post- group of effects would be a cool feature. That may not be so clear to picture, but think of it as configurable signal chains that are ALWAYS present before the input jacks on the left and after the output jacks on the right. These could be configurable like any other pedalboard (including button and control assignments) and then the real pedalboard just drops in and uses the output of the global pre-processed signal chain as its inputs and outputs to the input of the global post-processing signal chain.
Why is this useful? Well, I have found there is always something I would like to have on pretty much every pedalboard (compression on input, global EQ and gain on output, I’m sure there are other use cases), and having to tweak the settings (like gain or EQ) within each pedalboard or preset to match room acoustics becomes tedious to re-adjust and persist.
It could be implemented as traditional pedalboards using the standard builder, and then these are saved into the pre- and post- pedalboard slots. Then other pedalboards can choose to use the pre- or post- processed signal, or to bypass these global modifiers and just use the hardware inputs and outputs.
Anyway, just a thought. On the surface it seems not that difficult to implement - just wrapping a UI on it in a sane way may be the most difficult thing.
I wanted to chime in here. I “ordered” a Dwarf and would use it on my Bass guitar pedalboard. Currently I have a fully parametric EQ in my amp send/return that I use for room and speaker correction. It would be nice to replace this with an EQ plugin in the Dwarf, but that would need to be globally enabled accross different pedalboard settings. I’d want to edit EQ settings on a per-gig base without going through all pedalboards, obviously. (The HX Stomp apparently has such a feature as well.)
Since the MOD devices are way more flexible in routing generally, it would suit them well to allow general sets of pre/post effects which could do more than just eq, like @mark_melvin proposed
I would also find that useful. And it would not even need the full flexibility of the main MOD plugins: one could setup existing plugins as pre1, pre2, post1, and post2 or so on a separate page in the settings and would not even need changes in the main UI.
I’d go much further to make this feature really useful: Sub-Patches. Just like you can do in similar applications like pure data, max/msp etc.
With that, one could just define a container with any number of audio, MIDI and CV I/Os, put any number of effects in it, give it a friendly name and save it. In the “master board” you would just have to chose your sub-patches and plug them together.
But there would be a tricky detail which has to be solved in order to make it work for pre/post effects: The engine has to know that one or more sub-patches have to be kept in their state when loading a different snapshot. I think the easiest way would be marking a patch as such and every future snapshots where the state shall be kept have to be derived from one master.
Yes, this is a bit more complicated but the flexibility gain would be tremendous.
A bit offtopic but: I like to arrange the effects according to the signal flow to keep an overview.
Since this signal flow can often change when creating a patch it would be good if you can select several effects at once and move them.
While I like the idea, it seems a bit complex to me. But how about an option to chain pedalboards or snapshots linearly? That would allow more modularity without introducing new terms or concepts.
Linear chaining could be the first step for a sub-patch implementation. The next step would be splitting a linear chain up, next the separate I/O definition etc.
