MODEP

[jtemple]

So I've searched the forums here to see if anyone has used MOD Devices or MODEP in the past and I only found 1 post with a passing reference from a few years ago. My older Line 6 Bass Pod XT is probably at end of life and I've been searching for a replacement. I've tried and/or listened to a number of devices, including SANSAMP, GK, Eden, Tech 21, etc. They are all great products but they have a specific "sound" and I was wanting something with a bit more flexibility. I stumbled across MOD Devices (Home) and thought it was an interesting device but a bit pricey for something I wasn't sure I was going to like.

After doing some further research I came across MODEP (MODEP - MOD DUO Emulator for Raspberry Pi) which is a MOD Devices emulator built for the popular hobbyist computer Raspberry PI. I have 3 PIs that I use here at home so I turned one into my MODEP box.

The software is basically free to download (download link can be found on the blokas link above) and you just load an OS image on the Raspberry PI. From there you just need a sound capture device. I used an old USB sound capture card and was pleased with the initial results so I bought the "Pisound" capture card from Blokas along with an acrylic case to house the PI and capture card. (Blokas – Online Store)

Here's the "box":

The right jack is input and the left is output (both in stereo). The top left knob is gain and the top right knob is output volume. There is a single button on the top that can switch between pedal boards, activate the Pisound wifi, enable bluetooth discover, etc.

So to build a pedal board all you do is point your computer or tablet to the server built into the Patchbox OS. Here's one that I've been tweaking for a few weeks now:

Here's chain:
Tuner > Looper > Preamp > EQ > Compressor > Cabinet Emulator > Gain > Output

Have to say that I am getting some great tones out of this setup and it's super easy to take my "rig" to church on Sunday morning. I will try and record some samples and upload them here at a later time.

So the Raspberry Pi is around $75-$85, then an official power supply is ~$15. The PiSound card was the most expensive component at around $100 and the case $16. You'll also need an SD card too and those are around $10. So for all in it's around $250. Of course you can use any USB sound capture device and skip the case so you're only in it initially for $100.

Now here's some things to keep in mind:
* You are building your pedal boards from scratch. There's no "make my bass sound like it's playing through an Ampeg, GK, Eden, SANSAMP, etc, etc" button. So if you don't like tinkering with your sound settings and just want a "plug-n-play" then this is not for you.
* There is no display in this setup. If you get the Pisound card there is an app that let's you connect via bluetooth to the device and you can select what pedalboard you want. Or you could always bring an iPad to your gigs to control the box. I find that once the pedal board is built I don't need to access the web interface while I'm playing.
* Unless you get a generic USB foot controller (like the Behringer FCB1010 there is no buttons to "stomp" or expression pedal. This works fine for me as I generally pick my pedal board and go. I found that I used very little of the POD XT so I'm not looking for something with a ton of options.
* Yes, the Pisound does have MIDI
* Yes, the Pisound input is stereo so you could split the input and plug 2 basses into this box, each with their own signal chain.

Passing along all of this for informational purposes. I'll try to upload some sound samples soon.

 

[BelowTheBenthic]

This is great! I have followed a very similar line of exploration in my search thus far.

Have you used your setup with a controller like the FCB1010? I'm trying to gauge how possible that is to set up.

The other thing I'm curious about is latency. Have you noticed anything? Realistically, my main use case is also for Sunday mornings. If I could trigger things with a foot controller while piping all effects through MODEP with minimal latency, I'd be pretty stoked.

 

[jtemple]

This is great! I have followed a very similar line of exploration in my search thus far.

Have you used your setup with a controller like the FCB1010? I'm trying to gauge how possible that is to set up.

The other thing I'm curious about is latency. Have you noticed anything? Realistically, my main use case is also for Sunday mornings. If I could trigger things with a foot controller while piping all effects through MODEP with minimal latency, I'd be pretty stoked.

I have not used the FCB1010 with my setup yet. As I mentioned, I basically plug it in, set the pedal board I want to use and go. I don't typically have to change my sound much on a Sunday morning so I don't really need a controller.

That being said, if you did go this route and buy an FCB1010 just be aware that you won't really have a screen that tells you, for each pedal board, what each button does on the FCB1010. You'd have to memorize or write down on a sheet of paper, etc. You can map any button on the FCB1010 to any pedal control on your pedal board. If you only have 1 pedal board in MODEP then it would be pretty easy to memorize what the buttons do ( I suppose you could put a label above each button on the FCB1010 with what it does).

As for latency, I have not noticed any whatsoever. I'm using the Pisound interface and it has very low latency. No issues there.

 

[RumbleBot]

I bought a PiSound for another project a little while ago but never ended up using it. So a few days ago I randomly remembered it and how I wanted to check out MODEP. I’m glad I did!
I’ve been using an ADA MP-2 tube guitar preamp into a high pass filter into a multi band compressor into a GK head for quite a while but got to wondering if I could consolidate a bit and still get the sound I want. Success! I was able to build a signal chain the very closely matched what I was getting from several units into a tiny little box. I tested it out tonight at practice and it sounded great! I was running it through a tiny GK MB200 head into a homemade Faital Pro 15PR400 loaded cab and it all worked out great. I managed to reduced a whole rack down to two tiny pieces of gear that can go toe to toe against a Marshall JCM 2000 half stack.
Apologies for the crappy pic of this unsuspecting little monster rig.
Open source software win.
Edit: I didn’t think to order the proper case for the PiSound setup so thank goodness for Tupperware…

 

[jtemple]

I bought a PiSound for another project a little while ago but never ended up using it. So a few days ago I randomly remembered it and how I wanted to check out MODEP. I’m glad I did!
I’ve been using an ADA MP-2 tube guitar preamp into a high pass filter into a multi band compressor into a GK head for quite a while but got to wondering if I could consolidate a bit and still get the sound I want. Success! I was able to build a signal chain the very closely matched what I was getting from several units into a tiny little box. I tested it out tonight at practice and it sounded great! I was running it through a tiny GK MB200 head into a homemade Faital Pro 15PR400 loaded cab and it all worked out great. I managed to reduced a whole rack down to two tiny pieces of gear that can go toe to toe against a Marshall JCM 2000 half stack.
Apologies for the crappy pic of this unsuspecting little monster rig.
Open source software win.
Edit: I didn’t think to order the proper case for the PiSound setup so thank goodness for Tupperware…
View attachment 4541630

That's awesome! I haven't tried using the Pi/Modep in front of an amplifier yet. I bet that sounds sweet through that GK head and your homemade cabinet.

One of the things that I have discovered is my active basses overload the input channel on the PiSound. Unfortunately it doesn't come with a input pad like a lot of bass amps have these days. So I bought and assembled the Mod Step Ladder attenuator that I put in front of the PiSound. This device lets me pad the input by 0db to -15db. And it requires no batteries so that's a plus. I think the primary use of this box is for adding a volume boost for guitar players that doesn't require a battery.

Here's a link to the device:

Invalid Link Removed

 

[RumbleBot]

That's awesome! I haven't tried using the Pi/Modep in front of an amplifier yet. I bet that sounds sweet through that GK head and your homemade cabinet.

One of the things that I have discovered is my active basses overload the input channel on the PiSound. Unfortunately it doesn't come with a input pad like a lot of bass amps have these days. So I bought and assembled the Mod Step Ladder attenuator that I put in front of the PiSound. This device lets me pad the input by 0db to -15db. And it requires no batteries so that's a plus. I think the primary use of this box is for adding a volume boost for guitar players that doesn't require a battery.

Here's a link to the device:

Invalid Link Removed

That’s pretty cool! Even though I’m running a six string bass with an 18V preamp into it, I’m luckily not having any clipping issues.
One of the plug-ins that I’m really liking is the Spice plug-in. It seems to be a psychoacoustic processor for enhancing low end perception.

 

[jtemple]

That’s pretty cool! Even though I’m running a six string bass with an 18V preamp into it, I’m luckily not having any clipping issues.
One of the plug-ins that I’m really liking is the Spice plug-in. It seems to be a psychoacoustic processor for enhancing low end perception.

I played around with Spice tonight a bit. I liked what I heard just messing around with it. Would you be willing to share your pedalboard once you get it dialed in? I'd be curious to see what you come up with.

Also, I might have volunteered to be the package maintainer for Model. I'd like to get modep upgraded to 1.10.

 

[RumbleBot]

I played around with Spice tonight a bit. I liked what I heard just messing around with it. Would you be willing to share your pedalboard once you get it dialed in? I'd be curious to see what you come up with.

Also, I might have volunteered to be the package maintainer for Model. I'd like to get modep upgraded to 1.10.

Here's my current work in progress pedal board. Basically a light tube drive stage, some EQ shaping, filtering, compression, and a little saturation glue at the end. I've got the Spice plugin doing its psychoacoustic processing on the low before removing the actual subsonics with the high pass filter. And having the subsonics removed before the multiband compressor helps keep the low band from pumping too much.

Getting modep up to 1.10 would be pretty sweet. I believe that would add file access from plugins, which would be nice. I've got some custom sampling/parallel processing software running on another rPi in my signal chain and it would to awesome to be able to rewrite and incorporate these into modep as plugins.

 

[jtemple]

Here's my current work in progress pedal board. Basically a light tube drive stage, some EQ shaping, filtering, compression, and a little saturation glue at the end. I've got the Spice plugin doing its psychoacoustic processing on the low before removing the actual subsonics with the high pass filter. And having the subsonics removed before the multiband compressor helps keep the low band from pumping too much.

View attachment 4555209

Getting modep up to 1.10 would be pretty sweet. I believe that would add file access from plugins, which would be nice. I've got some custom sampling/parallel processing software running on another rPi in my signal chain and it would to awesome to be able to rewrite and incorporate these into modep as plugins.

Sounds like you have some skill in development. Would you be willing to help with the upgrade?

 

[jtemple]

I'd love to hear your setup. Maybe we could export our pedalboard folders and share them here?

 

[sydneytdc]

Nice setups! A fellow PISound / MODEP user here. Pretty amazing amount of tech for the $$ and empowering if you're comfortable with the Terminal.app

I got mine to experiment with compiling from MaxMSP ~gen into the LVL format for some time based effects but the stresses of COVID induced workloads have sidelined that for now.

 

[jtemple]

So I couldn't upload my pedal board folder here as a zip file so I'm going to post a link to a Google drive file here. This file needs to be extracted on your RPi and copied to the /var/modep/pedalboards folder.

 

[RumbleBot]

I may be able to at least help with testing the upgrade while re-writing some of my custom effects as LV2 plugins. I use custom Arduino powered MIDI switches to control effects and trigger samples, so MODEPs MIDI support should still allow me to do that. The sampler would be the real interesting one as I have a screen in my unit that shows the sample grid and some other status info. I may still have to write a separate viewer that could somehow connect to the LV2 plugin, probably via MIDI, to retain that functionality.

The internal unit it a Pi4 with a Behringer Guitarport USB interface. One channel of the output is for bass while the other is the samples. The switches are run by a Teensy Arduino board in USB MIDI device mode. The Teensy also runs a separate little LCD screen that shows samples in the currently selected row. I basically modeled the switching off of an old Mesa Abacus foot switch. This is all still in a prototype state and will eventually have a proper case, circuit board, and wiring.



Anyways, here's a copy of my work-in-progress board.

Dropbox - TronBoard.pedalboard.tgz - Simplify your life

 

[jtemple]

Wanted to follow up with some updates on this setup. In case you haven't heard, MOD Devices had a cash flow issue earlier this year and almost wound up going out of business. Fortunately they got their issues sorted out and seem to be back in business. When all that happened the devs over at Blokas decided it was time to brind MODEP up to the latest version of the MOD software. I'm super glad they did! One of the features available in the latest release of the MOD software is IR cabsim loaders. I did the upgrade and downloaded some IR cab sim files and I can say it has REALLY added depth to the tones I'm getting out of MODEP. I also personally compiled the GxSVT plugin and that combined with the IR cabsim is fantastic!

So there were discussions on this thread about using a MIDI device to control some of the settings in MODEP, including the ability to have a volume pedal. @RumbleBot I decided to follow in your footsteps and build my own. I'm happy to report that I have a custom MIDI USB controller that I built from scratch! You can read all about the build over at the Blokas site:

MIDIZilla for MODEP

I built this MIDI controller for MODEP but in reality you could use it for anything. I even hooked it up to a DAW and was able to use one of the buttons to punch in/punch out in a recording. Very handy when you're playing and need to do a punch.

 

[sydneytdc]

JTemple, hats off to you! Thats a lot of work right there. Inspiring. I have a RPi and Blokas hat with MODEP. Will have to get it out an update it to the latest version.

 

[jtemple]

JTemple, hats off to you! Thats a lot of work right there. Inspiring. I have a RPi and Blokas hat with MODEP. Will have to get it out an update it to the latest version.

Yes, it was a lot of work but definitely worth it. I can alter/fix this device as I see fit so that is definitely a plus!

If you do the update let me know and I can send you the files and instructions on how to install the GxSVT plugin. They are working on a way for users to upload custom patches but they're not quite there yet.

 

[RumbleBot]

So there were discussions on this thread about using a MIDI device to control some of the settings in MODEP, including the ability to have a volume pedal. @RumbleBot I decided to follow in your footsteps and build my own. I'm happy to report that I have a custom MIDI USB controller that I built from scratch! You can read all about the build over at the Blokas site:

MIDIZilla for MODEP

That's pretty awesome! I actually recently started an adjacent yet non-MODEP related project. It a tiny little bass preamp built with an Arduino compatible Teensy 3.5 and the add on audio board. It has a roughly 2 second boot up time and runs with a solid 2.9 ms latency at 16 bit 44.1kHz.

So far I've coded:
Fairchild 660 style optical compressor
DBX 160 style compressor
Urei 1176 style FET compressor
Tube saturation with even order harmonic generation
Four band parametric EQ with adjustable Q and high and low pass filtering
Audio transformer saturation
Exciter

I can run all of these at only about 43% CPU usage on this little 120MHz 32 bit system. Of course, I had to write some optimized math functions to pull that off. Specifically, sine, pow, exp, sqrt, and tan. I rewrote these functions to be faster and within an execrable margin of error within the input range that I needed.
Here's the main unit without knob of casing.
Unfortunately, while I as wiring the rest up, I accidentally tapped the headphone jack with a live 9V supply and cooked both boards. Waiting on the replacements to continue. But so far I love it! I even added a power regulator circuit so that I can run the whole thing off of a standard BOSS style PSU!

 

[sydneytdc]

Really inspiring.

I’ve started playing with the RNBO object in MaxMSP as that’s quite a familiar tool for me.

 

[sydneytdc]

So far I've coded:
…View attachment 4908128

Hey RumbleBot,

Do you have a Git repo of your projects? Completely understand if you prefer to keep it private but it would be great to read through the methods you used for the implementations,

 

[RumbleBot]

Hey RumbleBot,

Do you have a Git repo of your projects? Completely understand if you prefer to keep it private but it would be great to read through the methods you used for the implementations,

Not a problem! This is just a work on process personal project, but have at it!

GitHub - VinzClortho/TeensyEffect