Both Plugins Are On the Darkglass Anagram Now
For about a year the most common reply to anything I posted about the plugins was some version of the same question: this is great, but can I actually gig with it? And the honest answer was no, not really. Not unless you fancy putting a laptop on a pedalboard and trusting it in front of a room. So: Box of Bass and Picking Fingers are now on the Darkglass Anagram, live on the Anagram marketplace, running on the pedal itself. No laptop. No interface. No praying the OS stays out of the way during the second chorus.
Why the Anagram
Because it is a real computer with real DSP headroom in a box built to be stood on, and because Darkglass opened it up to people like me. That combination is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of hardware will happily play back an impulse response; not much of it will let an outsider ship an entire signal chain as a first-class block that sits in your presets next to everything else you run.
The tone you tracked with is the tone you walk on stage with. That was the whole point.
What had to change
More than I would like to admit, and less than you would think. On the desktop a plugin gets to be a bit greedy: if a layer costs more CPU than it strictly needs, nobody notices. On the pedal there is a budget, it is fixed, and you are sharing it with whatever else the player has loaded. So the work was not really about sound, it was about arithmetic. Same engine, rebuilt for the hardware, then squeezed until it fit with room to spare for the rest of your board.
What did not change is the part that matters: the measurements. Every cab, mic and room in Box of Bass is the same capture from the same sessions that made the records, and Picking Fingers is still driven by the matched pick and fingers pairs I recorded rather than a curve I guessed at. I did not re-tune anything to flatter the pedal. If it sounded different on the Anagram, that would be a bug.
The two blocks
Box of Bass is the full rig: one bass signal split into the sub, the clean cabs, the driven mics and the rooms, blended back into one much larger instrument, all dialled from the Anagram's own screen.
Picking Fingers is the one people either shrug at or immediately get: it voices your bass as though you played it the other way. Fingers in, pick out, or the reverse, from the measured difference between the two. On a pedalboard it is a footswitch away from a different right hand, which is a strange and quite funny thing to have.
The desktop versions of both stay free here, exactly as they are. Picking Fingers is free on the marketplace too; the Box of Bass block is a paid one.
What happened next
Within days of the blocks going up, the first proper feature request arrived from someone who wanted to blend their own fat fingerstyle preset against the pick voice instead of choosing between them. That is a good request, so I am building it. This is the part of doing all of this alone that I actually enjoy: a stranger with a pedal asks for something reasonable on a Thursday, and it is real work by the weekend.
Get them
Both blocks are on the Anagram marketplace under Box Of Rules: Box of Bass and Picking Fingers. The free desktop builds are still on the Box of Bass and Picking Fingers pages, newest build always. If you run one of these on a stage, I would genuinely like to hear about it, so tell me.