I am currently, in collaboration with much of the team that collaborated on Harper and a newcomer, designing a Loop pedal. The loop pedal will be designed for and in collaboration with amateur musicians who would need a tool that can help them make solo music easily to practise their skills for a very low cost. Traditionally, loop pedals use on board computers to record, save, and play multiple sections of music over each other. They can be extremely complex or very simple, but the main concept remains the same, the pedal uses an on board computer to give the main hardware element (usually one or more pedals/buttons) functionality.
Our concept breaks this mould by using a mobile device as the computer (most mobile devices can handle extreme computational tasks, even music editing) bringing down the cost of a basic loop pedal from a $90-200 price bracket to something closer to $20. It works by using a basic on off pedal button as an external input device to control when to start recording and when to stop (a distinct floor pedal is crucial here, as it keeps the players hands free to hold/play the instrument being recorded). This input is sent to the phone via the data connection (a lighting connector in the case of an iOS device and a micro USB otherwise while the audio jack is plugged into an adaptor that splits input and output to a quarter inch jack and a 3mm headphone jack respectively.
For images check out the preliminary rendered images over in my portfolio.
Our concept breaks this mould by using a mobile device as the computer (most mobile devices can handle extreme computational tasks, even music editing) bringing down the cost of a basic loop pedal from a $90-200 price bracket to something closer to $20. It works by using a basic on off pedal button as an external input device to control when to start recording and when to stop (a distinct floor pedal is crucial here, as it keeps the players hands free to hold/play the instrument being recorded). This input is sent to the phone via the data connection (a lighting connector in the case of an iOS device and a micro USB otherwise while the audio jack is plugged into an adaptor that splits input and output to a quarter inch jack and a 3mm headphone jack respectively.
For images check out the preliminary rendered images over in my portfolio.