Pedalboards
Load a pedalboard and the device becomes that rig. A clean amp into a spring reverb for one song, a fuzz into a tape delay into a shimmer for the next — switching between them is a click on the Navigation encoder. The work happened once, in a browser; on the floor you pick the rig you already made.
Product Overview defines pedalboards, snapshots, and banks. This page is about living with them.
One board per rig, not per song part
Loading a new pedalboard takes a few seconds, and audio drops while it happens — the device tears down one audio graph and builds another. Recalling a snapshot is instant: the graph never changes, so reverb tails and delay repeats ring straight through the switch.
So the shape that works is one pedalboard per sound world, with the moment-to-moment changes saved as snapshots inside it. Keep a song's tones on one board and you switch between them mid-phrase. Spread them across three boards and you get a silent gap every time.
Snapshots within a song. Pedalboards between songs. Playing Live turns that rule into stagecraft — holding levels steady, fixing the room, and ordering boards into a setlist. For now, just hold the idea: the pedalboard is the rig, the snapshot is the moment.
Where pedalboards come from
You build and edit them in MOD-UI, the drag-and-drop editor at pistomp.local — drop plugins on the canvas, wire them, save snapshots, group boards into banks. A fresh device already has a default pedalboard loaded so you can play the moment it boots, and you can pull ready-made boards from Patchstorage from inside MOD-UI.
You load and play them from the device itself. Highlight the pedalboard name with the Navigation encoder and click to open the list — see Navigation & Controls for every device-side control.
Deciding what goes on one
Knowing how to wire the canvas doesn't tell you which of the 663 plugins to wire. Choosing Pedals is the workflow for that: design the chain against the editorials, find and stage any captures or impulse responses it needs, confirm the plugins exist on your device, then build and save.
Start there if you have a sound in your head and no idea which plugin makes it.
Saving
Changes you make — swapping plugins, re-wiring, tweaking parameters, toggling bypass, on the LCD or in MOD-UI — are not saved automatically. To keep them:
- System Menu → Pedalboard Management → Save current pedalboard
- Or Save in MOD-UI
Each pedalboard is a bundle under /home/pistomp/data/.pedalboards/. Snapshots and per-pedalboard config overrides live inside that bundle, so saving the pedalboard is also what saves your snapshots. Back the directory up and you've backed up every rig you've made.
Sharing a pedalboard
A bundle is a directory, so a pedalboard is a thing you can hand to someone. Copy one off the device:
scp -r pistomp@pistomp.local:/home/pistomp/data/.pedalboards/MyBoard.pedalboard .
Six files travel with it, plus one directory per plugin that stores LV2 state:
| File | What it holds |
|---|---|
manifest.ttl |
Bundle declaration — what the host reads first |
<name>.ttl |
The graph: plugins by URI, their port values, and the connections between them |
snapshots.json |
Every snapshot's parameter values |
addressings.json |
Footswitch, encoder, and MIDI bindings |
config.yml |
Per-pedalboard controller overrides |
screenshot.png |
The board as MOD-UI drew it |
effect-<n>/ |
LV2 state for the plugin at position <n> |
Impulse responses and NAM models
An effect-<n>/ directory does not contain the IR or NAM model its plugin uses. It contains a symlink into /home/pistomp/data/user-files/:
effect-21/Clean (G1 L0 B1 T1).nam -> ../../../user-files/NAM Models/Clean (G1 L0 B1 T1).nam
scp -r dereferences symlinks and copies the file contents. git and tar do not — they preserve the link, which then dangles on the recipient's device. The plugin instantiates and the board loads; the model is silently absent.
List what a bundle depends on:
find MyBoard.pedalboard -type l -exec readlink -f {} \;
Each of those files must be copied to the recipient's device, into the same subdirectory of /home/pistomp/data/user-files/ it came from — NAM Models, Speaker Cabinets IRs, or Reverb IRs. Names must match, including spaces and case.
Redistribution. Commercial IR packs and NAM captures are frequently licensed to a single purchaser, and a captured amp may carry restrictions of its own. Free downloads are not exempt: Tone3000's terms bar bundling or redistributing tones from the site through third-party platforms — see the licensing note. Verify the licence before sending these files to anyone. The pedalboard repository does not accept them.
To contribute one, fork TreeFallSound/pi-stomp-pedalboards, commit the bundle directory whole, and open a pull request. Before you do, check the three things that make a board work on someone else's device: every plugin URI in the .ttl must be one that ships with the stock image (a board that needs a Patchstorage plugin should say so in the PR), screenshot.png should be present, since it's how people browse, and find . -type l should come back empty — a board that depends on a file in user-files cannot be distributed as a bundle alone. Include the snapshots — a board with a verse and a solo tone teaches more than a board with one.
Going the other way, swap-pedalboards.sh <git-url> replaces your whole collection from any git remote. See Configuration.