The default knob positions caused some confusion. We had a lot of artist demos in our booth, which allowed me to do usability testing and get feedback. Sylvie added it to her graphics and printed the prototype. A week before NAMM, I walked to a restaurant near our workshop to have lunch and think of a name and settled on "Tensor". That described the pedal well, but was long and didn't fit with our other pedal names. Up to this point it was called "Time Mechanic", after the Jeff Mills records. Sylvie suggested covering the prototype in car camoflauge, which car companies use to obscure details of new car designs when they road test them (a common sight on roads here in Detroit). In early January, 2017, I grabbed a blank Raster blem enclosure and laid out the control labels. In between, I spent time fine-tuning pitch shifting and time stretching. ![]() The rest of 2016 was consumed by switching some suppliers and automated more of our manufacturing to increase production. The goal was to allow intuitive and flexible sound manipulation with independent control over direction, time, and pitch, maintaining sound quality and playability so that you can focus on your playing. Holding down the right footswitch temporarily breaks from real-time and lets it drift. If you rewind beyond the memory limit, it does a tape stop effect. The Tensor is always listening, so you can go straight from bypass to rewind or loop what you just played. ![]() We also shelved another product that was nearly ready to go. There was still a lot of work to do, so I decided not to send the prototype to NAMM. In January 2016, I got the first hardware prototype up and running and it started to look like a pedal. At the end of 2015, the Tensor code was still a generic development board with an add-on board for potentiometers and audio input/output. I also upgraded to a faster processor and doubled the sampling memory to 2.4 seconds. I also did several more hardware prototypes for different size enclosures. I spent most of the winter and spring of 2016 writing the analysis code and testing with a wide variety of instruments, signals, and music. The Tensor constantly analyzes what you play so that you can manipulate direction, speed, pitch, and time stretch in any combination while minimizing latency. Like the Roland V-Synth, but in real-time, instead of sample playback. If can control tape speed and pitch, the obvious next step is time stretching. When grabbing part of a note, it is nice to have forward, reverse, or alternating (forward/reverse) loop playback like a sampler. That was the inspiration for the Tensor's Hold function and the Pitch knob. For the stuttering effect on "City on the Hill", he used the hold function on the Boss DD-6 to repeat part of a note, then a Whammy to pitch shift it. In September, 2015, Denver Dalley did a video with Reverb showing some of his innovative pedal tricks. The Tensor was initially focused on doing tape stop, slowdown, and reverse effects in real time. The first prototype had 1.2 seconds of sample memory. Most of the fall and winter were spent getting our new UV LED printer up and running and dealing with production emergencies, but I made some incremental progress on the Tensor. I was also working on another product using the FV-1. For the new pedal, I switched to a faster processor that could handle more advanced signal analysis and allowed me to reuse DSP code that I had written over the previous 20 years.ĭuring the summer of 2015 I started designing a new hardware platform, set up a development environment, and wrote code to bootstrap the processor and handle basic functions like reading potentiometers and getting audio in and out. The Context, Bitmap, and Raster also use the FV-1, which is fun to program and pushes you to think about effects in a creative way. The Raster was delayed three months because of powder coating issues with the first batch of enclosures.īack in 2010, I chose the relatively new Spin FV-1 DSP chip for the Particle. I had been kicking around the idea for a few years, but the reality of running a small company is that most of your time is spent on bookkeeping, ordering parts, and managing production. Several years earlier, someone suggested that we make something like the tape stop effect on the old Digitech XP-300 Space Station. ![]() ![]() In April, 2015, the Raster went into production and I started working on our next pedal.
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