Stompenberg FX: Demo and play over 150 pedals live via the internet (opens in new tab)

The idea and the execution is seriously innovative and impressive.

(After troubleshooting a local issue with a failing USB microphone I can verify that the live mode works great. This is the real deal.)

Don't miss the photos of the physical setup from the gallery features to the right of the pedal detail pages; excerpt:

https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...

https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...

https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...

It's Raspberry Pi-based. Can anyone identify that presumably audio add-on board with lots of connectors? Perhaps it's a one-off inhouse design.

I have so many questions as to how they're handling controlling knob changes! From the pictures it looks like they've yanked the pots out and hooked the boards up to their rig, which raises more questions.

This is something I've tried myself, and it's not trivial. Digipots won't work in the signal path and are noisy and imprecise, so companies that do this (there are very few!) like Chase Bliss use vactrols. Using those precisely is still tricky, as pot values in many circuits are all over the place and have different tapers, whereas most vactrols have a voltage/resistance curve that looks more logarithmic.

Would love more information on this, as it's a topic that's difficult to research.

Hats off to those who came up with this and convinced their superiors that it's worth trying.

Most pedal demos don't give a very good idea how something will sound with your setup, because well, they're using their own, filtered through speakers and microphones at that.

There's also a video showcasing this project over at their synth channel at youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBYRQUTzYk

Is there some mute button I'm missing? I've tried with both Chrome and Edge to play the pre-recorded riffs for a few different pedals and am not getting any sound. I verified I have volume on my end with a youtube video.

More details here: https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simula...

This is an absolutely amazing tool and is one of the main reasons I keep buying stuff from Thomann - I'm looking at a pedal, see the little Stompenberg FX demo popup and I can try it out right from my home! It's great and has definitely directly influenced some of my purchases. Hope they never get rid of it!

I started on a project of this nature about 2 years ago. So cool that they've follow through.

My method was to have users record samples, re-amp them through each pedal, record the output and then make that available back to the user.

It wasn't live/realtime. And the pedal setting has to be pre-defined.

It worked, but it was limited. My intention was to use it for rare / vintage / analog pedals.

Fun project, but this execution is waaaaay better. Very glad someone got it.

There’s a couple of similar SaaS services for analog studio equipment -

https://mixanalog.com (also has a couple of analog reel to reels)

https://accessanalog.com

Both really good if you want full remote access to analog studio hardware worth thousands that you don’t use often enough to buy.

You can also use multiple together and chain them however you want

If there was an open source hardware/software solution for this, or some kind of easy to use platform for people to list their gear, I think a lot of people would “rent” their gear online

This is genius and makes me wonder why I didn't think of it.

Edit: they already thought of that!

I wanted to do the same with hardware synthesizers, and was planning on calling the service SynthCloud but that name was already taken by someone else doing something else, and that’s my excuse :p

Wow this is awesome, as an IT guy working with webrtc/voip, a hobbyist guitar player and electronic aficionado this looks amazing. Kudos to all the team working on this.