Will we ever see a truly new effect?

[Gone Fission]

A few people have mentioned the Prismatic Wall, which uses Karplus-Strong physical modeling. There have been hardware synths and software plugins using physical modeling as an effect for years though.

Objeq by AAS dropped over 7.5 years ago. It can make guitars/synthes/pianos sound like wooden blocks, percussion, and various other timbres. It's good for really compressed plucks and extreme timbral shifts. They offer a free 15-day trial, for anyone who wants to explore that.

https://www.applied-acoustics.com/objeq-delay/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtmH3jCnU8U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AuVdRQKNhs

It'd be cool to see chaotic synthesis or vector synthesis in the pedal space, but they wouldn't be new---just new for the pedal space. Granular was a theoretical concept for 50+ years, before it started becoming common in the pedal world (Particle V1, CT5).

Am I missing something that makes the Prismatic Wall’s basic technology fundamentally different than the Lexicon PCM-70’s “Resonant Chords” algorithm or the similar resonators is the Eventide DSP series harmonizers? Seems close enough practically speaking. So Jan Garbarek’s back catalog should give ideas.

[coupleonapkins]

Moist revolutionary will always bee the BOSS tuna: it instantly kills the shitty guitar playing that inevitably emits frome yr amp like it was nebberkinezzer!

And Eventides only do that when they're nearly borken ffs!

Also: I have a neu peddle sound fer yas......but I'll nebber tell

[Bellyheart]

To add: the market is driving this as I'm sure people have mentioned. There's a reason people have clones "with modern twists/features" or "on steroids".

New ideas are hard for people to implement and guitarist are no exception. When the Rainbow Machine(based on an even older pedal that failed due to no one knowing how to use it) dropped no one knew what to do with it and I immediately bought it and put it in as many songs of my band as possible just to see. The chorus effect ended up being what I used it for the most.

The amount of times I've talked to guitarist or seen a band and they have pedals that do their own thing but they do not use them at all(Ct5, glitch pedals, synth pedals) is way higher than those that do. They'll engage them during soundcheck or when they want attention but they do not know how to apply them to their music because that's not the thinking they are doing. Some people need Melt-Banana to understand effects and still cannot implement them in their own way.

There's a lack of creativity somewhere in thinking what you HAVE to do with music and I've noticed there's a lot of videos of cool sound pedals being demo'd that I wouldn't see live that frees a person from the performance aspect but it would be dreadful live. Rarely do any of these people get support for their music. It's like video demos are becoming a genre of music and pedals are designed to fit the style but live no one gives af.

[Glenouille]

It's like video demos are becoming a genre of music and pedals are designed to fit the style but live no one gives af.

This!

In these videos, the performance always begins with a musical instrument of some kind, whether it’s a guitar, a synth, or a noise box. Over time, it transitions into pure knob manipulation. To produce even half of the meaningful sounds demonstrated, the pedal often needs to be extensively adjusted manually. Don’t get me wrong — I think that’s fantastic. The pedalboard becomes an extension of the creative process, which is exactly what I want.
However, I find the form factor and user interface are poorly suited for this purpose. Useful functions and options are crammed into small enclosures, forcing musicians to navigate through switches, presets, and other hurdles just to achieve the desired result. The effort required to produce an acceptable outcome is excessive. I feel like this not only affects what I want to play but also forces me to limit the complexity of what I create with the instrument to interact with the pedal’s interface. Ultimately, many of us end up layering sounds and creating soundscapes. While this is an accomplishment and can be rewarding or even the primary objective, it often feels like a compromise to me. In my case, I resort to it because managing more intricate parts while performing advanced pedal manipulations becomes almost unfeasible.

For example, I’ve been experimenting with the CB Mood 2 recently. Last weekend, out of sheer frustration, I began developing a Python-based MIDI interface to control it. The issue is that when I adjust knobs A, B, C or D at varying intervals during a performance, I practically need to annotate those movements on a separate tab. Which knob did I move? When exactly did I move it? By how much did I move it by and in which direction? It’s now as if I’m writing a new line of instructions just to keep track of what I’m doing with the pedalboard.

I’m not sure if we’ll see groundbreaking new effects from an audio treatment perspective anytime soon, but I hope pedal manufacturers start paying more attention to how we interact with their products. The balance between the possibilities their pedals offer and the practicality of harnessing those possibilities is way off. Pedal interfaces have seen little evolution over time. Some of today’s pedals are light-years ahead of a basic Solasound overdrive in terms of functionality, yet their interfaces remain strikingly similar.

There are numerous pedals and effects I already own that I feel I’m vastly underutilizing because of these design shortcomings. This isn’t even touching on the high cognitive load and the frequent need to relearn each pedal’s quirks or deal with their lack of intuitiveness. If I were to suggest where research and development should focus, it would be on improving these interfaces, not on introducing yet another effect I’ll likely underutilize.