The Endless AI guitar pedal has potential

I’m not sure anyone has ever asked for an AI guitar pedal. But it was inevitable that someone would build one. One of the first to take action is Polyend, a well-known musical instrument manufacturer known for building niche, magical instruments. The company has made grooveboxes around followers of the old schools it’s the most pedal you can do follow the steps. So there was hope that if anyone could succeed in AI, it would be Polyend.

Polyend is Endless and a $299 adjustable guitar pedal powered by an ARM processor. It’s integrated with Playground, a multi-tasking AI assistant that turns every sound into a guitar. If you have an idea, you don’t have to wait for someone to already build a pedal; you can just reply. Maybe there is a special combination that you always wanted, but no company sells it because there is no need to combine the ring module / auto-wah. I’m not sure this is what guitarists aspire to, but it’s a good first attempt at marrying an LLM.

To be honest, AI is not in pedal. Instead, Polyend has trained the famous LLM to put effects that you can put on the pedal. You can also create results yourself in C++, but many people probably download them for free Brother (as Polyend calls results) from the community’s website or have them log in The playground. You can also pay $20 to have a physical screen compatible with the download.

Currently, the Plates database contains about 60 results, which are produced by Polyend. They cover everything from simple saturators to tape test loops and guitar synths. There is also an automatic drum machine. Some of my favorites include Grunt (lo-fi octave down effect), the Infinite Hall reverb, and Card (small word for word changer). There is also Starsthe most impressive delay, verb, and vibration that can be difficult to find elsewhere.

Polyend is also opening a repository for third-party contributions, so you can control what’s happening in the Playground and submit it for consideration.

The playground that’s why so many people will be watching Endless. It’s a front-end for multiple AI agents working in parallel, trained on the Polyend library. The various AI components interpret your input, select algorithms, generate code based on those inputs, and then validate the code to make sure it works without blowing your ears.

If you’ve used a chatbot before, the Playground app should look familiar. You define the effect you want with its controls (you have three knobs, plus short and long presses on the footswitch to work with), and it will come up with several options to turn your idea into something that works.

Usually, you get three options. You can just pick one and let Playground do its thing. But you can also make tweaks at this conceptual stage, before it starts generating any code and, above all, costs you money.

Creating results costs tokens. Pedal comes with 2,000 tokens, and you can buy more for $20 per 2,000. This should be enough for several results. The plan is subtle, but the results are very complex, and the repetitions it takes to make it happen, it costs a lot of money. A simple fuzz might only cost you 20 tokens, but a choppy fuzz with a bunch of fuzz connections can cost you 500.

The only thing that can chew up your tokens is not the original generation, it’s repeating to get what you want. Especially if what you’re looking for is amazing. Trying to find the Polyend Playground to understand the right levels of bandpass filtered tone, or the amount of ring you want in your bad fuzz, can be frustrating.

Polyend gave me 10,000 tokens ($100) to review the Playground as part of this review. In total, I went through a little over 3,500 tokens and got three results that I was happy with and a few duds. If I were paying tokens out of pocket, I wouldn’t want to repeat it. Also, Playground can be slow to spit out code. Depending on the complexity, it can take five to 10 minutes each time. Many times, I would get tired and give up five or six times if I still didn’t get what I was hoping for.

The ones that caused the most trouble were what fans call “Resonant Taps.” I advocated “digital delay where the delay lines consist of narrow, narrow filters with subtle transitions.” The first model did not control for delayed responses. And when combined with sound filters, it was almost always close to being selfish. Very unpleasant. Switching the resonance control for feedback didn’t help much.

Finally, after six generations, I tried to encourage and explain the sound I had, instead of combining the results. I wanted to “slowly change the pings that follow my guitar, almost like a string section.” Instead, I got what sounded like ’70s synth with a nervous breakdown. It was fun, but not really what I was looking for. So after spending $7 worth of tokens, I put the idea aside to find something that would be more immediate, like a frenzy, that broke. CD-skip results.

Even this took effort to attract life. My initial experience of “random stuttering and glitching” and “tap tempo” with the integrated ring module was difficult. Even slowly, the stutters sounded like a machine gun and didn’t make any sense.

It took six generations and mostly asking for stutters to be closed down to 16, 8, or quarter notes to get what I was hoping for. And despite asking to increase the ring level in each generation, it still feels a touch more subtle. That said, I love the end result. It’s delightfully chaotic and it’s dirty-sounding enough.

There are other complications that you need to order. Endless can only open one at a time. Installing new ones is easy – you just plug it in via USB to your computer, it looks like an external drive, and you drag the files. But, even though the pedal automatically restarts when you download a new one, most of it doesn’t seem to work properly until you manually cycle it by removing it. Similarly, you may need to manually uninstall Endless and reconnect to your computer before installing the new version. This greatly reduces iteration and testing.

Obviously, the statement I’m trying to make is complicated – there are many variations. But that’s kind of the point. There are a million and one digital delay and fuzz pedals out there that can do these things better than the Endless could. If you just want consistent results, you’d be better off building a small set of cheap pedals than relying on AI. The only reason to get Endless is to try to create the results of your dreams that don’t exist.

It’s important to keep your expectations in check, though. Polyend’s Playground effects are whipped up based on your inspiration and can’t compete with the careful editing of professional audio engineers, or even dedicated volunteers. What Eternal is good at is quickly testing ideas that you can take further, either by programming them directly in Eternal C++, or in another platform such as Max MSP or Pure Data. It’s a shame that Polyend doesn’t reveal what was created in the Playground to expand.

You might be better off checking out some of these ideas for a modular guitar pedal if Poly Effects Beeboand Empress Effects ZOIAor even Time for H90which allows you to assemble building blocks to create patches. Now, both devices cost more than the Endless, at $ 449, $ 549, and $ 899, respectively, and they have developed areas and fixed firmware, and they produce high-quality results. I’d rather spend an hour making results on my ZOIA than fighting an LLM.

And finally, understandably, the AI ​​feature might turn some people off. But to its credit, Polyend seems to be trying to use AI as efficiently as possible. In addition to building code itself from results developed in-house or from open sources, the company is also trying to deal with the environment. Some features of Playground are performed using external AIs via API, and there is no control over this. But founder Piotr Raczyński says Playground’s servers are on-site, not in another data center; Polyend he says The servers are “nearly 100% self-sufficient due to solar power and heat pumps.” It is essentially a “free, open pasture” for LLMs.

If you’re anti-AI, nothing will change how you feel about Endless. It’s probably one of the reasons why Polyend avoided using the word “AI” when it was announced. But if you’re a skeptic about AI, or have fully embraced the world of LLMs, this might ease the guilt you’re feeling. The main advantage of Polyend Endless is that it is an affordable and accessible way to create custom designs. If a large group blooms around it, as someone has done for ZOIAit can be a major source of one-time trial results. But consideration and the world of music ordinary you are far away for AI, that’s “if”.