Been having far too much fun building and programming these pedals. Amp sim plus multi FX based on the Daisy Seed:
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Martin Aspeli
@optilude@techhub.social
mastodon 4.7.2Habitual coder, guitarist, builder, pedant.
195 Followers
105 Following
39 Posts
Joined April 26, 2025
I’ve made an open source NAM A2 and cabinet IR pedal with a nice sounding plate reverb. Much fun. Sounds great!
Current status: making a NAM capture of my amp.
After some tweaking and sorting out some noise issues, I think this sounds really good now. NAM A2 is very impressive. My current favourite is probably this capture pack, which just sounds good across the board: https://www.tone3000.com/tones/friedman-buxom-betty-gtrmike-27287
I just made one of these and it is super fun and sounds impressive.
DIY digital multi effects pedal. Stereo, with a small display and six knobs plus a rotary encoder.
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@stevegrunwell@phpc.social Gear is its own joy. Don’t confuse joy with utility. #GearSquad
The Google app on my iPhone has started adding “live activies” for certain football games. I didn’t ask for this. Just suddenly appeared. Wtf.
I deleted the app from my phone.
I am actually quite astonished by this still. I probably broadly agree with the underlying complaint. The size of the settlement is big enough to be material even to Meta. I didn’t expect that.
I’ve two mid-teens who strongly want more social media apps than I’ll give them (but their friends have), and the added complication that next spring the UK may set an (enforceable?) age limit of 16.
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@stevegrunwell@phpc.social so early impressions are the hardware doesn’t suck (no obvious clock noise issues, seems thoughtfully designed, not the prettiest). App is good. Better than most competitors.
The built in modelled amps are decent but don’t make me go “wow”, which is basically true for all of these devices.
Effects are good though I realise I’m a massive reverb snob and the plate and hall here are again decent without being lush. This matters because with NAM you need the reverb for headphone playing.
The reason to get this I think is NAM. I’ve not done an A/B yet with same NAM profile playing on a computer. I want to do that soon, time permitting.
But I also haven’t you found “the” NAM capture for me. So I’ve just ordered a reamp box to try to make my own…
#rabbithole #GearSquad #guitar
I have been working on a DIY reactive load box with IR speaker simulation for playing a tube amp silently - akin to a UA Ox Box or Two Notes Captor X. I think it’s finally done! It was a lot of fun to make.
All the hardware and software are open source and there are extensive build instructions.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQHTY69k00g
The Mulebox – A DIY Reactive Load Box with IR Cabinet Simulation
This is quite niche but in the spirit of sharing: Here is a free, web-only tool that converts a stereo wav file to a mono wav file of exactly 191 seconds (you can change the length).
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb7a1212-8004-4beb-9e35-b4f199e95314
I use this for NAM capture uploads to Tone 3000. Basically, I’m recording the capture in AUM on my iPad connected to a USB audio interface and a reamp box. AUM can save 24-bit 48Khz files, but it’s always stereo, and you have to manually stop the recording. Tone 3000 requires mono and exactly 191 seconds.
I didn’t want to pay for or find an app that could do this simple operation, so I asked Claude how to best solve it, and it made me this webapp.
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@eyesquash@mastodon.world that’s easily accomplished with a partscaster. Might need a bit of routing for the neck pickup but you’ll find scratch plates for that layout easily.
I have learned to capture Impulse Responses from speaker cabs. Well, using my Ox Box as a speaker for now.
Wave Arts IR Capture does a great job and is free. Previous attempt using Reaper and ReaVerb ends in a UI WTF.
Needed a clean amp for the sweep signal and got a tiny TDA2030A based solid state amp from Amazon and soldered some sockets to it.
No enclosure so I put it in a cardboard box.
Actually sounds decent!
Signal chain is USB audio out -> mini amp -> Ox speaker input -> ox line out -> USB audio in. Hardest part was getting levels to match sensibly across the chain and not clip the tiny amp.
So I got it into my head that I want a telecaster deluxe with Lollar Deluxe Foil (basically gold foil humbuckers in a wide-range humbucker form factor) and then I was like, why not a Bigsby, and now I’ve spent hours trying to work out what bridge to use for this purpose.
I think the Deluxe has strat string spacing and neck and takes a strat Hardtail six saddle bridge normally, and a Bigsby B5 needs a low rear bridge.
Welp. I have ordered a hang board and plan to hang it above a door frame like some sort of obsessive. #climbing
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In case you’re curious - some screenshots of the app (on mobile - it spaces out a bit more on a bigger screen)
#Guitar #GearSquad #MusicTheory #Jazz
I discovered Tailscale recently (late to the party). It’s solved a bunch of security and remote access issues for me. Combined with Nginx Proxy Manager, PiHole (dhcp and local dns) and LetsEncrypt I have a good setup to expose Home Assistant, Next Cloud and various internal administration tools.
I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and an Ethernet adapter and stuck it on the back of my router (powered via its USB port), just running Tailscale as a cheap and hopefully reliable entry point into my home network, even if other services (on my NAS) go down.
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@punishmenthurts@autistics.life @bardmoss@autistics.life I can’t help with the woodworking, but my local luthier (who’s excellent) once told me, “anything can be fixed”, and he is clearly right. I’d go deep on YouTube and maybe use Gemini or Claude to guide your search. Others will have fixed a similar problem before and shared it.
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@tpherndon@hachyderm.io I didn’t find it so much as create it. :) Would love for others to build it. Happy to answer questions and let me know how you get on!
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@dotsie@mastodon.social I did not know that! That would have saved me a bit of money and irritation. I did manage to capture some decent sounding IRs through. Might try again now that you told me that.
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@dotsie@mastodon.social Nice! I found this thread which now has me wanting to drill a hole to fit a jack I will probably never use. :) https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/how-to-mod-your-uad-ox-for-line-in-with-pics.2332937/
Ironically, I was making IRs for this project, which is nearing completion: https://github.com/optilude/MuleBox
I think if anyone else ever does build it, it’s likely they’ll also bring their own commercial IRs, but I wanted to at least ship it with some OK-sounding ones. Plus I had never learned how to make IRs before.
There is a lot of AI scepticism in my timeline in general, and around software engineering in particular. Much more than there is AI chest-beating (good!)
And the concerns are real and valid. But I also think there are things to be excited about. I have been able to build products (digital guitar effects in this case) that previously would have been well beyond my grasp. And they turn out to be really good. And it is enormously fun.
Yes you can generate slop with no care for quality. But the code I get out of my use of AI is not that. Nor is it easy to wield these tools - it is a new and complementary skill. And the practices and tools are evolving very rapidly. It’s confusing but sometimes exhilarating.
Nothing is universally good or universally bad. I do think as an industry, software engineering is at a precipice as profound as the birth of agile or the arrival of apps. And the future can still be shaped by those of us who care about quality and value and integrity.
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@mathias@metalhead.club Just thinking about this some more… if I select the “slice” of the chart with F (outer circle) and Dm (inner circle) and select “Harmonic Minor” (or “Melodic Minor”), should that be F Harmonic Minor or Dm Harmonic Minor? As in, should the modes of the minor scales use the inner circle or the outer circle as their primary reference?
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@nilace@curloftheburl.nylarea.com glad you like it!
If you just want the load box part, you really need the JohnM design on the Marshall Forum. Link in my repo.
It’s a very long thread but the front page has the key details and he still answers questions if you ask there. Mulebox is mainly adding the IR based cab sim via the Hothouse and Daisy Seed.
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Update: saw that it can record raw guitar signal over USB (it’s got four channels: stereo processes guitar audio, mic input, and raw guitar sound) which is something only the NUX can do and is genuinely useful to me.
Amazon prime delivery expected today before 10pm.
Give me strength…
#guitar #GearSquad
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@mathias@metalhead.club try it now. It doesn’t move the C5 (I think that’s confusing) but it states the derived tonic under the drop-down and updates the Scale tab.
Blackstar Beam Solo update:
A NAM on the device and the same NAM played on my phone via the beam acting as a USB interface sounds identical. Except the phone app is normalising the input and output level so for some of the captures it sounds way louder by default. Need to bost the levels in the Beam preset.
(Note that this requires you to select input 3 as the input to the phone based modeller and you need to create a “silent” preset on the Beam or you get both sounds at the same time.)
The reverbs in the beam solo are …. not awful but not great. Definitely algorithmic and not convolution IRs, and they sound a bit metallic. I can get lusher sounds on my phone if I plug in a USB cable.
When using a NAM as the amp on the beam, you can only have noise gate effects before it. Which is ok but you can’t have a modelled drive into a captured amp, say. Nor can you stack one capture into another. Nor can you use your own IRs for the cabinet. You are basically limited to single “combo” amp + cab captures. Which isn’t a huge problem but limits the available captures.
Still no clock noise or other artefacts. I still like the app UX. The hardware is pretty intuitive. I like that it’s only five presets loaded at any time. Simple is good.
A man owned a lake and wanted to skate on it when frozen over in the winter. Unfortunately it was covered in snow and twigs and bird droppings. He didn’t want to pay someone to sweep it. So he invented CURLING and got people to pay to play a game of stone and brooms on his lake instead.
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@mathias@metalhead.club Thank you! I agree. The way you describe it working is more logical. I think it should then also remove “parent” reference but explicitly say scale name so have “Dm Aeolian” somewhere when I select Aeolian mode of F. And also preselect the Scale tab to Dm Aeolian.
For some reason I instinctively open apps on my Home Screen with blue icons. I used to open Facebook all the time and it’s so inane these days I eventually deleted the app. For some reason I now open LinkedIn all the time instead, which is just as inane most of the time (it’s miraculous that so many people are AI experts just as the AI bubble reaches peak frothiness, isn’t it?).
Someone make a good and honourable app with a blue icon please.
RE: @simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
I really like Simon’s writings on AI in software engineering. He is always grounded and balanced and he writes well. This introduction (and the set of practices underneath) is well worth bookmarking.
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@codinghorror@infosec.exchange @trendsbot@mas.to I could only read up to paywall notice. At that point it looked like the article was saying candidates for jobs are asking how much compute their teams will get (akin to, “what kind of laptops will I get?“) to decide if they take a job.
Not “tokens are part of your compensation”.
Does it go on to suggest the latter? Tokens for work or personal purposes?
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@mathias@metalhead.club @d10c@hachyderm.io try to sign up at https://guitar-practice.martinaspeli.net and have a poke around?
Is there an innovative tyre company whose slogan is “reinventing the wheel”, and if not, why not?
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@d10c@hachyderm.io good catch. That’s a function of the heading styling but i should be able to fix that.