From a cursory glance it appears to be a physical guitar pedal that lets you program virtual effects. The "vibe coding" aspect is likely a system directive + effects library SDK docs fed into an LLM along with the user prompt that generates the appropriate C++ which is then compiled into an effect and run on the pedal.
Note: Which is still very cool. The previous programmable guitar pedals that I've seen were all pretty low-level.
Ive been interested in doing this with a raspberry pi. Ive plugged my guitar to my pc and used FL Studio, a daw, and can add effects to it live and was curious if someone would code a os (i guess) that only ran VST (the filters) and had a screen and knobs to control things. I know its very possible, I just didnt have the time to learn how to do it.
Lol, you read my mind. I’ve been wanting a generic-looking, wood-grained “tablet display” covered with a dozen PHYSICAL faders, sliders, and knobs that you can leave permanently hooked up to a DAW that interfaces with virtual synths for over a decade now!
When you switch to a different VST, the hardware’s display would dynamically update all the text around each dial and button to match the corresponding virtual control.
Slightly related, there was a programmable guitar pedal based on the Pi Zero called the Pedal-Pi a little while back that might interest you:
> I’ve been wanting a generic-looking, wood-grained “tablet display” covered with a dozen PHYSICAL faders, sliders, and knobs that you can leave permanently hooked up to a DAW that interfaces with virtual synths for over a decade now!
Just one of several. These have existed for at least two decades, save for "dynamically update all the text around each dial", which has a variety of complications that I won't go into here.
Yeah I should have clarified - I have plenty of generic MIDI controllers. The special sauce is reflecting the "VST" rendering/presentation of its own sliders/dials onto physical ones.
This means not having to look up and down constantly between your computer monitor and the physical hardware since the knobs/dials each have small screens/displays are 1:1 matches (so Frequency Range, Sub Audio, Clamping Point, Oscillator Frequency, etc).
VSTs are rather inscrutable and I think it would be difficult to design in an agnostic way that played nicely out-of-the box with the majority of them. Doesn't stop me from lusting over the possibility though.
I am a little confused. I think you the mean reverse of the usual mapping: (a) from the surface to the plugin GUI (b) the plugin GUI is drawn to look like the surface. Right?
Interesting idea, but creates a bit of a coding conflict: the plugin developer writes the plugin GUI (typically feeling they've lavished a lot of love on it); they're not in control of the layout of a control surface (and indeed, may have no way to know what it is). So a job that would really be the job of the control surface manufacturer can't be done because that's the domain of the plugin developer.
It's fairly easy to imagine a single control surface offering this for a tiny subset of all possible plugins, but getting beyond that seems pretty much impossible to me. There was a protocol that Digidesign/AVID bought back in the mid-oughts which did maybe 60-70% of this, in the sense that it provided negotiation between the plugin and the host/surface. Problem was, it was so complex that almost no 3rd party plugin developer or control surface developer was willing to get involved.
From a cursory glance it appears to be a physical guitar pedal that lets you program virtual effects. The "vibe coding" aspect is likely a system directive + effects library SDK docs fed into an LLM along with the user prompt that generates the appropriate C++ which is then compiled into an effect and run on the pedal.
Note: Which is still very cool. The previous programmable guitar pedals that I've seen were all pretty low-level.