Yeah, we’re guitar playing geeks. We just can’t leave a thing alone. We stick all kinds of crazy stuff on our guitars to make them louder (remember, there was a time before the first magnetic pickup changed the world), more expressive(once there was no floating trem!) and just more us.
We change guitar strings, pick-ups, cables, bridges, nuts and on and on and on. We buy amps and dial in the settings. If it’s a tube amp, we change the tubes. We experiment with cabinets and speakers and even different grill cloths.
But mostly…we buy pedals. And more pedals, and then the next one, and then I have to have that one.
Once we get these pedals home, the more adventurous of us open them up and start modifying them. There are generations of folks with soldering irons who’ve swapped out transistors, diodes and op-amps just to see what it sounds like. Pedal boards around the world are filled with pedals from folks that started doing it as a hobby (ok, obsession), and found a life-long career.
Well, at Line 6 we’ve had a tone-jones going for a while now. And we love analogue pedals. We’ve modeled a bunch of them and put them in our products! However, we really love what is possible in the digital realm. We’ve made a whole bunch of great sounding pedals, and some of them do things that analogue pedals have a really hard time doing. That’s where we love to tweak.
And now, you can too. That’s the whole idea behind the ToneCore DSP (Digital Signal Processing) Developer’s Kit. We’re offering an easy access platform for DSP programmers and pedal nuts who want to work in a software-based approach to sound design. Now, with our hardware platform and this set of developer tools from Freescale, we’ve made it possible for you to go in and “muck-around” with software based effects and hear the results in a real world setting, without having to go out and manufacture the hardware.
We hope you enjoy the adventure, and we look forward to hearing what you come up with. Who knows? You might develop the next sound of rock and roll!
