The Endless AI guitar pedal has potential

I’m not sure anyone was really asking for an AI guitar pedal. But it was inevitable that someone would build one. One of the first to take the plunge is Polyend, a well-respected music gear maker with a reputation for building niche, idiosyncratic devices. The company has built grooveboxes around old-school trackers and a multi-effect pedal that you can step sequence. So there was at least some hope that if anyone could do an AI effect pedal right, it would be Polyend. Polyend’s Endless is a $299 programmable guitar pedal running an ARM processor. It’s paired with Playground, a number of interconnected AI agents that turn any text prompt into a functioning guitar effect. If you have an idea, you don’t have to hope that someone’s already built that pedal; you can simply prompt it. Maybe there’s a specific combination of effects that you’ve always wanted, but no company sells it because there’s no demand for a combination ring modulator / auto-wah. I’m not convinced this is what guitarists are yearning for, but it’s a well-intentioned first attempt to marry an effect pedal to an LLM. To be clear, the AI isn’t actually in the pedal. Instead, Polyend trained a custom LLM to code effects you can then load onto the pedal. You can also build effects yourself in C++, but most people will either download existing free Plates (as Polyend calls the effects) from the community site or prompt them in Playground. You can also pay $20 for a physical faceplate to pair with a downloaded effect. Right now, the Plates gallery is home to about 60 effects, mostly developed by Polyend. They cover everything from simple saturators to tape loop simulators and guitar synths. There are even self-playing drum machines. Some of my favorites include Grunt (a lo-fi octave down effect), the Infinite Hall reverb, and Tessera (granular pitch-shifting reverb). There’s also Stardust, an enormous-sounding granular delay, reverb, and tremolo combination that would be hard to find elsewhere. Polyend is opening up the gallery to third-party contributions as well, so you could whip up an effect in Playground and submit it for consideration. Playground gives you a few starting points for turning your prompts into effects. Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge Playground is the reason most people will be eyeing Endless. It’s a web frontend for several AI agents working in tandem, trained on Polyend’s own effects library. The various AI components interpret prompts, select effect algorithms, generate code based on those building blocks, and then validate that code to ensure it will run properly without blowing out your eardrums. If you’ve ever used a chatbot before, the Playground web app should seem familiar enough. You describe the effect you want and its controls (you have three knobs, plus short and long presses on the footswitch to work with), and it will come back with a couple of options for turning your idea into something functional. Generally, you get three options. You can just pick one and let Playground do its thing. But you can also make tweaks at this ideas stage, before it starts generating any code and, more importantly, costing you money. Generating effects costs tokens. The pedal comes with 2,000 tokens, and you can buy more at $20 per 2,000. That should be enough for a few effects. The system is a bit opaque, but the more complex an effect, and the more iterations it takes to get it right, the more tokens it costs. A simple fuzz might only cost you 20 tokens, but a granular looper with rhythmically synced glitches might cost you 500. Iterating and testing is easy, but time consuming. Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge What is likely to chew through your tokens isn’t the original generation, it’s the iterating to get what you want. Especially if what you’re looking for is balanced weirdness. Trying to get Polyend’s Playground to understand the proper resonance levels for a bandpass filtered delay, or how much ring modulation you want in your evil fuzz, can be frustrating. Polyend provided me with 10,000 tokens ($100 worth) to evaluate Playground as part of this review. In total, I went through a little over 3,500 tokens and got three effects that I enjoyed and a handful of duds. If I were paying for tokens out of pocket, I might have been less inclined to keep iterating. Also, Playground can be slow to spit out code. Depending on the complexity of an effect, it could take anywhere from five to a little over 10 minutes each time. Often, I’d get bored and give up after five or six attempts if I still wasn’t getting what I was looking for. Prompt: A clean multi-tap digital delay where the delay lines have narrow highly resonant bandpass filters with subtle modulation.(opens a new window) Prompt: A clean multi-tap digital delay where the delay lines have narrow highly resonant bandpass filters with subtle modulation. The effect that posed the most trouble was what the chatbot called “Resonant Taps.” I prompted it for “a clean