Custom Build Arduino Guitar and Loop trigger Pedal for Ableton

Hey, here’s a picture of this new guitar pedal I am making for Ableton live. I’m going to use an Arduino to trigger midi.

I decided this year that I’m going to play my live sets with guitar and sing through a laptop. I want to be able to make loops, trigger songs and be able to store all my presets delays and automation for the guitar and one project.

Performing my album Valley of Sapphire, I realize that this is easy to do with Ableton, plus you can preprogram all your automation. This really opens a new world of performance. With computers being so fast there’s not so much latency anymore.

I just picked up a Waves PRS amp combo plug-ins and they sound fantastic. They honestly sound like real amps with feedback, harmonics and tubes etc. I’m very happy with them.

The only plug in that I’m having a hard time finding is a vocal harmonizer that can trigger harmonies by sensing the chords I play. Although, I can preprogram harmonies for my vocals with Nectar by Izotope. But the problem with Nectar is its very CPU intensive and I can’t trigger the harmonies via the guitar chords that I play.

This pedal that I am making with an Arduino will let me trigger 20 different pedals and loops with a within Ableton via MIDI. I’m going to start using this pedal to perform with. It’s a lot lighter than the whole guitar pedal board, plus I can really go out of this world with the effects and automation.

I use the Ableton looper and, I can take out the guitar and vocals in my songs that I bounce down. Heck, I can use the plug-ins on my guitar and vocals live that I used in the original track.

Playing parts of songs in loop style is fun but it’s hard to focus on triggering the right things at the right times when you’re performing. Playing as a street performer all these years, I really try to put the audience interaction as priority. It’s more important than pedal dancing and trying to do complicated things on stage. So, it’s better to have a backing track than having to trigger the different parts of the song. Although there is a lot of freedom and being able to trigger parts songs live.