Are There Any 'New' Effects?

[stewblack]

Wikipedia tells us that in 1948 DeArmond released the Trem-Trol, the first commercially available stand-alone effects unit.

My question is, what is the most recent effect, the newest thing in the world of stomp boxes? 

 

[itu]

At least it's something digital. Do you consider a looper an effect? How about synthesizers, but no, Hagström did it so long ago. Are cab simulators effects?

effectsdatabase.com might help?

[stewblack]

55 minutes ago, itu said:

At least it's something digital. Do you consider a looper an effect? How about synthesizers, but no, Hagström did it so long ago. Are cab simulators effects?

effectsdatabase.com might help?

It was an idle thought. Are we at the end chain? Or do new effects still get invented?

What was the last 'new' pedal? 

[itu]

Maybe harmonizers are the latest. Delay based are delay, chorus, and flanger... then there's phaser, ring modulator... Digital technology made harmonizers possible: first commercial Eventides (since 1973!) were already digital. After studying Eventide's achievements, there are very few "new" effects since 1970's. Someone else should open up the subject and show the stuff I do not see right now.

[stewblack]

I assumed that someone here would know. Lot of pedal heads here. 

[MartinB]

There are companies coming up with new ways to produce existing effects, e.g. Gamechanger Audio do a pedal that uses plasma discharge to generate distortion, and one that uses light to enhance reverb. And there are new ways to control existing effects, like Rainger FX's liquid-controlled overdrive, various gesture-based alternatives to expression pedals, etc.

But genuinely new effects? I reckon we may have exhausted them all. What can you do to an audio wave? Change the frequency, amplitude, and phase - that's your pitchshifter, your tremolo/volume pedal/compressor and (almost) your phaser. You can add in some noise with harmonics and clipping to get your various flavours of dirt. You can introduce additional copies of the wave, to get delay/echo/flanger, and then phaser if you change the phase on the copy. Isn't everything else just some combination of these? EQ/filtering is just adjusting the amplitude of specific frequencies, instead of all frequencies. Add in the ability to apply that EQ differently based on the incoming signal amplitude, and you've got an envelope filter. An octave pedal is just a copy of the wave with the frequency halved. And so on.

Once you move from analogue to digital and you're sampling the wave, you can do things like fiddle with the encoding to get a bit crusher effect. And some things probably just can't be implemented in an analogue circuit, like the harmonisers itu mentioned - you might be able to get a second signal at a different pitch, but I'm guessing not the smarts of having it change the interval based on the pitch of the input and the selected key.

My hunch is there are still plenty of interesting things to be done with sound in the digital world, but it's all combinations of effects that already exist - just applied/combined/controlled in new ways. Things like shimmer and granular particle reverb feel "modern" to me, but even those have been around for donkey's years now.

Well anyway that's my 2p. I am not an expert and could be talking out of my derrière!

Edited April 24, 2021 by MartinB

[stewblack]

My vote was going to be the bitcrusher. 

But that's probably because I only heard of it relatively recently. 

[paul_5]

4 minutes ago, stewblack said:

My vote was going to be the bitcrusher. 

But that's probably because I only heard of it relatively recently. 

You might be correct; true 'bit crushing' is only possible using digital audio, so it's probably the most recent invention.

[Kev]

Follow Iron Ether.  In terms of what you may find in an effects pedal, they always seem to be pushing the boundries.

[Downunderwonder]

12 hours ago, MartinB said:

Isn't everything else just some combination of these?

I don't know what the Prunes & Custard recipe is but a very listenable discombobulation is the result.

[bobbass4k]

4 hours ago, paul_5 said:

You might be correct; true 'bit crushing' is only possible using digital audio, so it's probably the most recent invention.

Though "true" bit-crushing is digital you can do a decent impression of it with an analog circuit, though I actually don't know which came first, it could very well have been the digital.

As martin said, there's only so much you can do to a soundwave from a physics perspective. We've hit the limit on actual unique effects, don't forget none of the are particularly new  - everything now is about the boundaries of digital - combining the effects and controlling them in ways that weren't possible before.

Look at something like the Rainbow Machine - it's fundamentally a delay and a pitch shifter, but the way they're combined and the controls you're given makes it sound completely unique.

[paul_5]

5 hours ago, Downunderwonder said:

I don't know what the Prunes & Custard recipe is but a very listenable discombobulation is the result.

It’s 5 parallel clipping stages, each tune to *very* close frequencies. Messy and chaotic, but in a really food way.

[chris_b]

I am not very knowledgable in this area, but would the latest pedal of interest be the HPF? Is that an "effect"?

HPF seems to be a subject in the spot light these days.

[stewblack]

27 minutes ago, paul_5 said:

It’s 5 parallel clipping stages, each tune to *very* close frequencies. Messy and chaotic, but in a really food way.

 

30 minutes ago, paul_5 said:

It’s 5 parallel clipping stages, each tune to *very* close frequencies. Messy and chaotic, but in a really food way.

Hey, I would love one of these, is uit buildable for someone with your skills?

 

[Jus Lukin]

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Edited March 14, 2022 by Jus Lukin

[Passinwind]

On 24/04/2021 at 04:46, stewblack said:

Wikipedia tells us that in 1948 DeArmond released the Trem-Trol, the first commercially available stand-alone effects unit.

My question is, what is the most recent effect, the newest thing in the world of stomp boxes? 

 

Impulse loaders.

[Passinwind]

49 minutes ago, Jus Lukin said:

It's just EQ, and has been around for yonks. I know I yapped on about them here a few years ago, which went down a lot better than the compression I was also rabbiting on about at the time! 😃

Yep, some of us have been using them since at least the mid-70s or so.

[stewblack]

1 hour ago, Passinwind said:

Impulse loaders.

Oooh

[Downunderwonder]

4 hours ago, stewblack said:

 

Hey, I would love one of these, is uit buildable for someone with your skills?

 

Paul Crowther would be happy to build you one.

[NickA]

Something that corrects pitch and timing would be useful.  Sort of auto tune in a small box. 

The timing bit would be hard as in the case where you hit a note a bit late, it would need to know what note you were going to play before you played it... so needs to see a little bit into the future.

[adamg67]

The Source Audio Ultrawave has some cool ideas. Morphing between two different 10 band eq settings using an envelope is fun.

Edited April 26, 2021 by adamg67

[Downunderwonder]

http://www.crowtheraudio.net/buy-online/ get yer Hotcake and P&C here.

[itu]

10 hours ago, NickA said:

Something that corrects pitch and timing would be useful.  Sort of auto tune in a small box.

There was a unit called Russian dragon (from rushin' and draggin') years ago, but it (actually they, there were few models) disappeared quickly. It showed how steady was your playing. Some units can be found every now and then in Reverb:

https://reverb.com/item/502289-jeanius-russian-dragon-rd-t-timing-indicator

[Jus Lukin]

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Edited March 14, 2022 by Jus Lukin

[pineweasel]

What about the EHX Freeze? I'd never seen anything like it when my guitarist mate got one a few years ago.

Edited April 27, 2021 by pineweasel