They do great work and were highly recommended by some great folks in the pedal world. In 2019 I started contracting out manufacturing to a Chinese PCB fab/assembly house. With the things that they taught me and some other things I learned for myself, I had a good base to confidently blow off the dust off of Arcades and take another stab at it. Over the interim years, I gained a few new skills here and there, just from working on new pedals, or from advice/wisdom shared by smart pedal builders like Ryan from Dr. Then other projects came up, things happened and it pretty quickly got pushed to the wayside. I quickly realized I didn’t have the skills to carry out that project and give it the justice I really wanted to….so it was scrapped.
You can watch the real piece of garbage I had whipped up in action here: Fast forward a year or so, in between college classes I was able to whip up an early prototype. But still, I had an idea for this pedal and I wanted to carry it out. Not to say that it hasn’t been tried/done before, it has been done. The second I realized that a pedal’s personality could be swapped in and out easily just by removing and replacing these EEPROMs, I became obsessed with the idea of making a video game like cartridge system for pedals. The neat thing about this chip is that it can be programmed with an external EEPROM, or memory device. It was a project based on the Spin semiconductors FV1, a digital chip that has been used in all my subsequent designs. The first pedal I designed was called the AARP, back in 2015. Its something I’ve wrangled with for years, and has really been a trip trying to get this thing into your hands. I’m not one to talk about myself and the things I do, but I feel as though this project needs to be discussed. Each cartridge comes with eight powerful effects algorithms. On the other hand, having a pedal with two cartridges is not like having two pedals, because you can’t play them at the some time nor plug them into each other, and it’s less than ideal for live situations, in which tiny cartridges get easily lost.īut Cooper FX is a creator of creative effects that find their ideal use in a studio or sound design situation, so in this optic the format seems to make more sense and has a higher probability of success.Ĭheck out what the Cooper FX Arcades can do with the first batch of cartridges ( delay, reverb, pitch, lofi). In this optic, a cartridge system allows pedal lovers to get a brand new effect at a much lower price, since they don’t have to pay again for those components. – not to mention the time spend soldering them all together. The idea has its merits, because the majority of the cost of a pedal is tied to its hardware: knobs, switches, case, etc. Reputable and adventurous builder Cooper FX is now giving this format a shot with a pedal called Arcades, a multi-effect platform inspired by vintage video game consoles. Several manufacturers have flirted with the idea of a cartridge-based pedal that can change personality based on the different cartridges available (most infamously, the aborted Console Project by Devi Ever), but so far none of these attempts has gained popularity. Here are the videos using assorted cartridges: The pedal itself is $329 and comes with 2 cards of the customer’s choice. Generation Loss – delivers tons of sounds from the original unit, a few capabilities from the Chase Bliss unit, and some brand new lofi goodness!.Synth – a collection of monophonic and polyphonic (!!!) synth sounds.Grain – focused on granular time stretching, glitch effects and sample mangling.Reverse – as psychedelic as it gets, it also features pitch shifting.The cool thing about a cartridge-driven pedal like the Cooper FX Arcades is that it becomes something entirely new every time a new cartridge is released.
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