This thing has been all over my Facebook feed the last few months. Pretty much marketed as a piano-style sustainer for your guitar (or whatever you plug into it). Retailing for $299 so YMMV. For what it's worth their demo videos sound good.

Any number of cheap 80 s rack digital delays and the Digitech PDS pedals have something called a ˜hold feature, which keeps the repeats going, though it s not like a self oscillation slam switch. Also not like a Freeze, which I thought sounded kind of canned, and not in a good way. I think it could be worth a try.

I want to play piano chords on guitar. Like more than 6 notes at a time. I play a chord at the bottom of the the neck and then another higher up. How can I get them both to sustain at the same time?Does this thing I want to exist exist? And if so what is it?

Isn't this sort of what the EHX Superego does?

Unless you volume-swell it in, and maybe pad it with another delay, that hold feature is going to give you GLAnnggGLAnnggGLAnnggGLAnnggGLAnnggGLAnnggI dunno if that piano key pedal sounds radically different to the many other freeze-type DSP pedals around these days, but it sounds like that's the sort of thing you want. If you're like me you'll probably want to avoid the one with the douchey fake piano pedal for a button just out of principle, especially after seeing the atrocious post-jazz version of Amazing Grace they use as a promo video.But there seems to be a glut of this sort of pedal around now. They're just little programmable DSP boxes; you can make 'em do whatever.

Madman Munt wrote:Hmm, sounds a little bit shit to me. Maybe could be tweaked to sound more seamless...The other week my guitar player friend who is always changing the pedals on his board, he was showing me his new reverb-freeze-type pedal. And that thing, if you didn't like what it was doing, you could load it up with something else by playing an audio clip on your phone, which you just hold up to your guitar pickup and blast the data in. And the pedal would load up the new program and do something different. The pedals are just little computers.So, you could tweak one of those sorts of pedals to do exactly the thing you want by writing a custom piece of code. You could make them do all kinds of things. Which sounds daunting maybe but it's actually a hell of a lot easier to understand than analogue electronics...The difficulty is not so much with the hardware as it is about breaking down the nuts and bolts of what exactly it is that you want it to do.That piano pedal seems to always kick in with a big volume surge as the pedal-generated tone blends with the original guitar signal, but what to do about that is another matter.

Madman Munt wrote:Custom pedal programmer. It could be a new career. Oh man, for real. I only started learning about these programmable DSP pedals because somebody has asked me to look into doing one. I am SOOO not an expert but there's a ton of info online; it's basically the same as writing a VST.I'm not sure how exactly freeze pedals extract a smooth loop; something to read up about later maybe. I think you probably could do something like you describe, using the initial attack as the trigger. Make the freeze slowly decay rather than hold forever, and when the effect triggers you could do some kind of crossfade between the live note and the held note so it "catches" any sustained notes you play and smoothly blends them in.You can also do a Fast Fourier Transform to pull out the component frequencies of the signal and use that to synthesise notes. Pretty sure that's what them EHX organ pedals are doing. It wouldn't be difficult to make any triggered notes sustain indefinitely... but since you're synthesising the notes it's more like a guitar interface for a keyboard than a guitar, that's why those kinds of effects tend to focus on synth and organ sounds.

Or I guess you could get yourself an electric harp. I imagine that's probably what a guitar with piano sustain would sound like?

Freeze pedal's only gonna sustain your first chord tho. You'll need a second one to hold more than one sample.

Right. It's not exactly what I wanted. But I think it will solve the problem that made me want what I wanted, if that makes any sense. It makes me feel better learning impossible two-hand piano chords just knowing that it is out there.