Arduino saves you a bundle when it comes to guitar pedal effects

[Deadbird] wanted to recreate some guitar pedal effects that he heard on a music video. The thing is, you can end up spending a bundle on hardware unless you’re crafty like he was. He grabbed a Whammy 4 pedal, but decided to forego using a $125 MIDI controller and sourced an Arduino to perform MIDI-based alterations instead.

The Whammy 4 was chosen for its ability to perform the sound processing he desired, but also because it can be MIDI controller. By hooking up the Arduino to that port (as seen in the diagram above) he’s able to program changes that would be difficult or impossible with just the pedal. For instance, [Deadbird] illustrates a command which jumps from the lowest to highest setting of an effect without hitting any of the values in the middle. With that under his belt he goes about programming loops of changes with delays in between them. The best part is, you’re only limited by your ability to craft the MIDI commands as Arduino code.

Get tons of MIDI knobs and buttons with the Chomp

Although MIDI was originally designed for 1 MHz computers with 64 kB of RAM, it’s still an industry standard almost 30 years after its introduction. Even for electronic artists armed with a microcontroller, MIDI is old hat if you want to connect a few buttons up to a music workstation. What if you wanted to connect dozens of buttons and knobs to a bunch of MIDI hardware, though? Enter Chomp, the Configurable Hardware Open-source MIDI Platform.

[Max Justicz], an awesome pseudonym if we’ve ever heard one, built a MIDI controller that allows for 48 inputs for buttons, knobs, and any other electrical connection imaginable. The board is powered by an Arduino-fied ATMega328 and connects to your sensors through 2×5 ribbon cables.

If you’ve ever thought about building a monome MIDI controller, [Max Justicz] has started a Kickstarter campaign to put a few hundred Chomps out into the wild. It seems like a great way to build some controllers or simply to send stuff to MaxMSP. Either way, the Chomp is sure to be useful.