Open Source

Between songs

When Moncy is not writing music he builds software, and he gives it away. Some of it is used by other guitar players, and their names are in it. Some of it builds the other software. All of it follows the one rule that runs through everything on this site: the machine proposes, the person decides.

Two of these tools are open source today, which means the code is public and anyone can read every line, use it, and improve it. The other two are still in the workshop. They are real and they run every day; they have not been released yet.

A modern guitar rig is a computer. It can make almost any sound ever recorded, and getting one specific sound out of it means hunting through hundreds of menus on a screen the size of a postcard. You know what you want. You cannot find the twelve settings that make it.

ToneCommand lets you type the sound you want in plain English. It works out which settings that means, shows you the whole list, and changes nothing until you say go.

Someone typed one sentence asking for a Judas Priest rig across eight eras. Six minutes later the finished preset stood on the hardware, every footswitch named, on video, unedited.

It gives the unit an undo button it never had. It lights up every other sound a change would quietly affect before you commit. It can hear a speaker cabinet in your rig before you decide on it and put your own cab straight back. It refuses to guess: if it cannot verify that a change landed, it tells you to go and listen. Every check it runs ends with the same line, "ears: pending, always."

The emblem is a TC monogram inside a gear. Bronze for the old soul, blued steel for the workmanship, and electric blue fire in the traces for the part that is genuinely new, with a human monogram at the centre holding both. There is a whole page on it, and a shirt.

The ToneCommand page Get it on GitHub

Everyone has heard that AI can write software now. The part nobody talks about is trust. When a machine tells you the work is done, tested and reviewed, how do you know it is not just saying so?

Handsoff is a foreman. It refuses to let a piece of work move forward until the test actually ran, a second, independent AI actually reviewed it, and a person actually pressed approve. Every one of those steps is chained to the one before it, so none of it can be quietly rewritten afterwards. If the machine claims something it did not do, Handsoff says so, in writing, and stops.

In a single day it took ten features through ToneCommand, start to finish. On another night it ran while Moncy slept; he woke up to finished work and a written record of every decision.

It comes with Mission Control, a screen that shows the whole run live: what phase the work is in, what is proven, what is waiting on a human, and a button for that human to press. It works on a laptop and it works on a phone.

The mark is the letter H, drawn as a twin-panel fighter with a wheel at its heart. Two hands off the controls, one wheel still steering, and a nod to a certain fighter everyone recognises.

Get it on GitHub

Moncy writes a task on his laptop in a coffee shop. A computer at home receives it, hands the job to a second machine, which hands it to Handsoff, and reports back to his phone: received, started, done. When the work is finished the folder empties itself and a log keeps the record.

There is no cloud service in the middle and no account to sign up for. The first real test was sent from a phone hotspot, and the laptop at home had started on it three seconds later.

Beakon is how the band ships software from anywhere. It is named for what it is: a light you set on a hill, and someone comes.

The mark is a B cut from stone with a beacon burning at its centre and the signal rippling out across the ground below it.

A guitar amplifier is only half the sound. The other half is the speaker cabinet and the microphone in front of it, and modern rigs load that half from a recording called an impulse response. Serious players collect thousands of them, with names like "412 V30 57 cap edge", and nobody can remember what any of them actually sound like.

IRCommand listened to all 7,655 of Moncy's, measured every one, and found that only 2,404 are genuinely different from each other.

Now you can ask it for a cabinet "darker than the one I am using, without the ribbon mic" and it answers from measurements rather than filenames. ToneCommand asks it for advice when it builds a rig. It has no emblem yet. It has been too busy.

Why give it away

Because the same conviction runs through the music. Tools serve people. Every one of these is built so that a person stays in command, can see exactly what the machine did, and can undo it. The code is public where it can be, and the names of the people who helped are on it.

The machine proposes. You dispose.

Built on a real rig, for real shows. Worship sets on Sunday, and metal when the stage calls for it.