The Elk Stomp is a pedal-shaped computer with sub-millisecond ears — the hardest part of putting real software on a pedalboard, already solved. THIRI is the musical intelligence that platform was built to host: a chord looper whose bed evolves under the player, so nobody has to stop playing to change the changes.
That's who the Stomp platform courts — your words. It's also exactly what we are: a music-intelligence engine that ships as software, looking for a floor to live on. The fit isn't an angle; it's your target market.
A hard-real-time audio OS, VST hosting on embedded hardware, roughly a millisecond around the loop, and a path from prototype to manufacturing. The reason smart pedals don't exist isn't ideas — it's this work. You did it.
Headless by design: a full remote-control surface, string
parameters that can carry structured musical data straight into a plugin,
and off-thread work requests for calling services mid-performance. That's
an invitation, and we're accepting it.
Think Max/MSP inside a looper pedal: the chord bed holds, evolves, and re-voices itself — and the player never takes their hands off the instrument.
The product, in one imageA looper that loops harmony, not just audio. The player sets a form, the bed plays it with real voicings, foot control steers sections and re-rolls, and THIRI keeps every voicing theory-correct as the form evolves — deterministically, the same answer every time.
Advance the section, hold the chord, re-roll the color, tap the tempo. Performance gestures map to musical decisions — the interaction layer your platform was designed to make trivial.
Progressions, voicings, and voice-leading, computed. The engine supplies the chord bed's intelligence — new sections, substitutions, re-voicings — delivered to the pedal as structured data while it plays.
The harmony sounds, right on the pedalboard. Voicings render through an instrument plugin on the device itself — playing-speed latency, no laptop on stage required.
The player's own layers stack over the living bed. Classic looper workflow, except the foundation underneath is harmony that can move.
Your platform's whole pitch is days, not months — desktop first, then commodity hardware, then the Stomp, then manufacturing. We're using it exactly as designed, and the build is portable at every stage.
The full looper logic against your desktop tooling — mock pedal controls, real audio engine, THIRI connected.
The same build on a Raspberry Pi with your free OS image — proof it runs on real hardware.
Pedal-grade controls, stage power, the real thing — the version we want to build with your team watching.
Your SOM and manufacturing pipeline exist precisely so a working prototype can become a shippable pedal.
FIRST STEP — the desktop prototype is in our Montreal build plan; we're registered for Aug 22–23 and building for the hardware track.
We're bringing the chord looper to the hackathon your team is judging — built on your stack, because it's the right stack. If the smart-pedal category is where you're headed, let's compare notes before the demo day does it for us.
dennison@bluesprincemedia.com · engine live at chords.thiri.ai · Montreal, Aug 22–23