Not sure how much my opinion counts here as I never bought any Mod products, although I checked and I signed up for this forum three years ago. My goal was (is) to have a pedal that I can develop and operate some form of custom DSP code in a solid pedal. To date, I’ve tried:
- Line6 Tonecore - support evaporated the moment I bought it (you had to install Eclipse with a very specific JDK, and the sample code was limited to a 2-band EQ)
- Bela - I got some Faust code running on it, was pretty difficult to get the cross-compilation setup working, but I did. Ultimately it is not a pedal, but more likely the basis of a self contained unit to make custom “instrument” or whatever. A bit noisy, which is OK for an “instrument”, probably not for a pedal.
- Elk Blackboard - again, not a pedal, and again, I purchased it right at the point that the company flipped it to open source to focus on other things. I generally watch the support forum to gauge whether or not something has active support - and that one didn’t, really. I managed to sell it though, so didn’t completely lose out.
- An old Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Studio with a Behringer UMC404 plugged in on USB - could never get XRUNs to completely go away with reasonable buffer/latency settings. You know what will make me stop using something faster than noise? Glitches from XRUNs. Just XRUN in the other direction.
- A Raspberry Pi going into the same UMC404, just running Raspbian, running Hydrogen Drum machine and Sooperlooper for starters (I recompiled at least SooperLooper and was customizing its interface to work on a 7" LCD when I gave up due to glitches again). Something about USB sharing an interrupt with Ethernet? Anyway I can’t turn Ethernet off, practically speaking, as that’s how I was accessing it. Used a USB MIDI footpedal and it actually worked. Just not well enough.
- The Spin FV-1. In this case I made quite a bit of headway, and am still working on “SpinCAD Designer”, a Java program I based on Andrew Kilpatrick’s open-source FV-1 simulator “ElmGen”. I had a forum I ran for several years and had people donate via Paypal if they wanted. It would have been OK but around 2016 I got hacked, which destroyed a bunch of the history of the forum, and compelled me to spend something like $400/year to keep that from happening again. Ah, this is just a hobby, one where I’m supposed to be having fun? I did make money from that but it was because I developed a reputation and got hired for a handful of consulting gigs before I decided I didn’t really need the headache for the small amount of money I was making off it.
- Experimental Noize FXCore - successor to the FV-1, I just have the dev board and have messed with it a bit. I was considering adapting SpinCAD for it but that looks like a TON of work that nobody’s likely to pay me for. I already approached the vendor, they were not interested.
- ESP32 on a smart-speaker dev board - based on Faust’s port to the Lyra-T board, I actually hacked in OSC support as well, which was great! I could put all the controls on an OSC panel on my tablet. Unfortunately, the thing ran out of code space before I could even get something as complicated as a feedback delay and flanger and low pass filter implemented. Also, the board I had was very noisy and went GRRRKKKTTKT whenever it got something over Wi-Fi. Not usable.
- Hoxton Owl - I just got in a Eurorack module used, for a good price. I see that most of their stuff is discontinued, but they have a “MKII” version of their guitar pedal. I may get one of those if I have fun with the Euro module. This device is cool (theoretically) because you can program it in Faust (which I may try) or using Max/Gen. I’m now studying Max, so this may be my path forward in life. However the Hoxton Owl has NO UI to speak of (a flashing LED to tell you which of 40 patches you have selected is laughable).
Let’s just review my particular foibles in all of this.
a) I hate writing DSP algorithms in code. That’s why I spent 3+ years writing SpinCAD. The amount of time you save when it comes time to put things together allows you to be “artistic” IMO. To make an analogy to painting, suppose that your paintbrush weighed 20 pounds. Would that change what you did with it? Writing DSP code directly, in most cases, is like having a 20 pound paintbrush.
b) I don’t care about pedalboards. I have a Headrush MX-5. Already it is too complicated. What I really would like is a modeler like that where most of it is completed and at a competitive level of functionality, but I can add my own blocks if I want to. MOD seemed like it wasn’t quite up to that, leveraging older open source plugins etc.
c) User interface is important. The old pedals on the floor approach has its benefits, after all. Everything is right there. Yes there are things we can’t do like remap the wiring in half a second. This is not a revelation, but you can tell that as it’s become possible to shove more and more and more guitar processing into a box, how exactly does one deal with it? I hate having to use the PC to tweak things. I had an HX Effects for awhile and went through some issues of it being noisy when connected to the PC, USB isolators, finally I gave up and sold it. Some people can deal with complexity at that level (like memorizing what is actually in 100 different patches), but I can’t. Going back to my earliest modeler purchase which was a Johnson J-Station, I finally settled on “Patch 42” as the one I liked the most. When I got a TC G-Major, it was patch 02. And then I would just sort of fiddle with that. But I never did anything like use setlists, because this all requires you to either plan things out way in advance, and/or memorize what all those sounds are. I don’t even perform live, I’m just recording weird things in the basement.
I don’t know what the answer is, and I feel for your predicament. Even though it wasn’t my company, I did way in the past design a cool piece of gear that was an utter failure in the marketplace. “But wait”, you say, “Alex Lifeson used one on tour for two years!” Yes he did. a) He didn’t pay for any of them b) John Entwistle did buy 5 of them c) It wasn’t enough. 3 years I spent working on that (too long, for sure), crammed every idea I had into it (bad idea), did some things that the market leader (the ADA MP-1) didn’t do, but not enough people cared.
When I was doing consulting on FV-1 based products, I discovered something that surprised me at first. That is, guitar players are generally REALLY conservative as regards creating sounds. The only way they can tell whether they like something is whether it was used on some seminal recording made at least 30 years ago. The real freedom came when I was working with a Eurorack vendor. They took some of the craziest stuff I could come up with and wanted more. So that is something to consider as well. The number of guitar players who want to develop a complex virtual pedalboard that they can’t easily interact with is going to be pretty small. That said, I don’t see vast success in Eurorack for programmable devices either. There are a few - the Daisy, aforementioned Hoxton Owl, a few FV-1 based things.
I do wish you all the best. Creativity and commerce do not always align.
DL