Frequently Asked Questions

Big Toe is a MIDI foot controller built to integrate with your MIDI enabled software and hardware. You will need an audio interface to connect with your software effects.

The Big Toe is not for sale at this time, and we are getting ready to launch our kickstarter where it will be available with discounts for early-birds. Until then, we are still very interested in gathering your feedback as we try to make sure the product meets your needs and meets all required certifications.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags power the pedals. Each tag represents a pedal.

When setting up pedals, you associate tags with MIDI events that will be sent to your effects software or hardware whenever that tag is read.

Connect your Big Toe to your computer/tablet/phone using WiFi. It will show up as a network device just like your home router. Connect to it. Start a web browser and type in bigtoe.local to start the Big Toe monitor.

The Big Toe monitor is where you add, modify and delete your pedal definitions as well as monitor your pedals live. It can also be used to trigger most midi events.

The default WiFi password is 1234567890. You can change this from the menu.

The default name of your device is “BigToe-“ followed by several characters which make up the MAC address of your device. The MAC address uniquely identifies your device on the network. Use the menu option to change this to something meaningful.

On a Mac, use Apple’s built in Audio Midi Setup Utility. Open the Bluetooth window and connect to your device. Big Toe’s LED will turn blue when connected.

On iOS and iPadOS devices you can use any number of 3rd party utilities to connect such as Conji. Some apps such as LoopyPro have this connection built in to their app.

Use a Bluetooth MIDI Adapter such as WIDI Master. Big Toe will automatically connect as a Peripheral device.

Once you have connected your web browser to your BigToe, open a browser window and type in the url bigtoe.local.

The Big Toe screen willl appear and you can start adding and editing your pedals.

Pedals are added to 'pads' reflecting your physical pads. Each pad on the screen can hold 4 pedals just as each physical pedal can comfortably hold 4 RFID tags.

Pedals are defined in the Edit window when you add a new pedal or update an existing one. Each pedal works in one of these modes:

• Footswitch — the classic stomp-box pedal. Big Toe automatically toggles between 127 and 0 to turn your effect ON and OFF.
• Momentary — sends 127 when you tap the tag, and 0 when you move the RFID reader away from the tag, "releasing" the trigger. If the momentary event isn't the pedal's first event, the OFF event fires right away.
• Expression — continuous control, like a knob or fader. A typical setup uses three pedals that share the same CC number:
  1. Baseline: set a value from 0–127 for where your "dial" starts.
  2. Increase: set +/− to Increase, and set how much to Bump the value on each tap.
  3. Decrease: set +/− to Decrease, and set how much to lower the value on each tap.
  Expression pedals that share a CC number show up on your monitor as one pedal.
• Trigger — fires an event without the on/off state management of a Footswitch. Used with PC (Program Change) messages and increment/decrement of the value, it makes an easy next/previous switch for presets or banks.

Yes. Using the Pad Layout menu option, you can set the number of pads on a given row on the screen and the order of those pads.

Yes, You can rearrange the order of pedals shown on your browser.

Press/touch and hold the pedal, drag it on top of the pedal location you where would like it to be and release. All other pedals will move right. If you drop between any pedal location, you pedal will move to the end. You can drag within a pad and from pad to pad.

When you set a Group name for Footswitch pedals, Big Toe will ensure only one pedal in the Group with that name is ON at any one time. This is useful for switching between effects of a similar type, such as distortions, reverbs, amp sims, or switching between channels.

Let's say for example, you have 3 pedals defined, Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz, that have all been given the same group name 'DRIVES'.

Tapping Overdrive will turn that pedal on and fire the event. Tapping Fuzz, will turn the Fuzz on and fire that event and turn off the Overdrive pedal.