Choosing Pedals
You've got a sound in your head and 663 plugins on the device. Closing that gap is mostly research.
Prerequisites
Four pages take you from a sound to a saved board, and all of it is curl, scp and MOD-UI. Designing the chain and picking captures needs only the editorials, the All Plugins table and your ears; everything after that needs the device on the network and SSH access to it.
| Phase | Device needed? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Research a rig — pick plugins, design a chain | No | Runs off the editorials and All Plugins |
| Find and audition captures the design calls for | No | You do this with your ears, on whatever machine you download to |
Stage your .nam and IR files |
Yes | scp into user-files |
| Confirm what you've got installed | Yes, ideally | /effect/list is the truth; plugins.json is a snapshot of a stock image |
| Get exact port symbols and property URIs | Yes | Only /effect/get knows them |
| Build and save the board | Yes | MOD-UI's HTTP and WebSocket API |
You can design a chain out of documentation, but you can't guess a port symbol. GxCrybabyGCB95 has a wah control and its symbol isn't wah. Once you cross from designing into building, the device is the authority.
LLMs and Pedalboards covers running the same four steps through a coding agent, and where a model gets each one wrong.
What sounds can I make?
Some targets are a documentation problem and some are a listening problem. Worth knowing which you're chasing before you start.
| Sound | What carries it | How hard |
|---|---|---|
| Late-60s fuzz into a cranked stack | Germanium fuzz into an amp pushed way past clean — GxFuzzFaceJH-2 into GxPlexi |
Easy. The plugins model those exact circuits and are named after them |
| 70s dub | Delay feedback, filter sweeps, spring reverb. The tone's in your hands, not the chain | Easy chain, hard playing. Get the delay right and put feedback on a footswitch |
| 90s alt-rock wall | A Big Muff variant, chorus, a cabinet. Open Big Muff is a real circuit model |
Easy |
| Shoegaze | Reverse delay, shimmer, stacked modulation. The order matters more than any one plugin | Medium. The shimmer and glitch delay editorials do most of the work |
| One particular player's one particular amp | A NAM capture of that amp. Usually somebody's done it | Medium, and you have to do it yourself |
The first four you can settle from the editorials. The last one you settle by listening: the search usually turns up captures, and you judge which is right.
Start with Research a rig.