Neural net names effects pedals

Humans have pushed against the perfections of electronics for years. One of the ways they’ve done this is by designing effects pedals meant to distort the sounds of music. The pedals usually have evocative names (“Morley Emerald Echo”, “Happy Snake Lucifuzz Fuzz”, “Lovepedal Purple Pickle Vibe”). I had never really heard of these until Will from 608device scraped 669 pedal names from harmony-central.com (with input from the stompbox fans at ilovefuzz.com). Could a neural network learn to imitate them?

If I trained a neural network from scratch, there probably wouldn’t be enough data for it to do more than memorize the short list of names and spit them back at me. So, I turned to a pretrained neural net called GPT-2, which I’ve used before. From the time it spent looking at huge sections of the internet, this neural net starts with a knowledge of which letters and words tend to go together in English. Using a colaboratory notebook set up by Max Woolf, I started with the pretrained GPT-2 neural net and then trained it for just a little bit on the list of effects pedals.

It is? kind of? spookily good at this?

A Tale Of Two Reverb Systems

A Room Like No Other

Best Damn Bass

Chuck Collins TinyTone Octifer

Meat Loaf Real Sweet Reverb

Boiling Point Coffee Deep Dish Fuzz

Cloudthunder Screaming Bird Tremolo

Damn Fine Aluminum Finger Wah Amounts Vibe

The Horribly Overgrown CIA Chorus

Release the Buffalo FLYBOARD Glamour Box

Booooooom

Blood Orange Overdrive

Beelzebub Wet Screamer Ear Flanger

Bigfoot Audio Radium Nitrate Distortion

Boogie Woogie Nonesuch Tones Embryo Chorus

Mr. Bubblegum Powered By God Tube Distortion

Although some of its names were a bit weirder.

Bat Face Down Under

AshesToYourFingerBox

K.S.Aji Sea Slug Chorus

Big Chocolate + Yellow Magic Delay

Big Cheese Big Cheese Box of Peas

Bite Outside The Bacon Battery

Me And A Big Bit of Cheese

Dentures Distortion Monster Dish

Blondie Moose Ant Farm Chorus/Vibrato

Anneliese Gillenamy The Nightlight Feminizer

Achtung Baby TinyMuffin Boost

Akahashi Harp of Confusion

Barton Junior Finger Pan Gelato Espresso Machine

Bare Knuckle Biochemistry Professor, Neuroscientist And Librarian



And these are… frankly a little unsettling?

Metalliv Robot Zookeeper

Machines Are People Too

Dangerous But Not Unbearably So

Beneath The Planet The Human Genome May Be Hacked

Am I really that Transhuman

Love and Sex Are A Mercy Clause

Atomic Brain Check Thank God We’re All Flying Again

Disastrously Varied Mental Model

Doomed To Think Or Predict in Chord Form

Dazzling So Beautiful Yet So Terrifying

Electric Sheep Fuzz

Empowered By the Power Of Mind Control

Misanthropic Fondue From the Oasis of Luxury Krautrock Parlor

A Shockingly Simple Method To Turn The Phrase, “I want this!,” Into Something Still Not Quite Envelope-Less Wheezy And Dreadfully Close To Normal

Bonus content: more neural net fuzz pedals!

