Freqently Asked Questions

Big Toe is a MIDI 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. But, we are very interested in gathering your feedback as we try to make sure the product meets your needs and meets all required certifications.

Each Big Toe pedal contains an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. Each tag has a unique identifier which allows for unique actions to be created. 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 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.

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 devices you can use any number of 3rd party utilities to connect such as BLE-MIDI. Some apps such as LoopyPro have this connection built in to their app. You can also use WiFi to transmit MIDI by creating a Network Session instead of using Bluetooth. Windows users will have the best experience connecting via Network Session and WiFi.

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

You set up your pedals with the Big Toe monitor screen that runs on any web browser as bigtoe.local The Big Toe monitor displays pedals you create arranged in a grid format.

Pedals are defined from the Edit window when you Add a new pedal or Update an existing one and operate in one of the following modes: Footswitch: This is the classic stomp box type pedal. Big Toe will automatically toggle values between 127 and 0 to trigger ON and OFF actions for your effects. Momentary: Upon tapping a tag defined as momentary pedal, Big Toe will send out a value of 127 and it will send out a value of 0 when you have moved the RFID reader away from the tag ‘releasing’ the trigger. Expression: Big Toe has a unique way of implementing expression or continuous control. A typical setup involves setting up a few pedals to implement expression pedal functions. Set one pedal with a specific CC number and a value indicating where on the scale from 0 to 127 you 'dial' is to be set. This may be your baseline value. Set a second pedal with the same CC number and value. Add an Adjust type, let's say Increase, to increment that value when triggered and the corresponding percentage to Increase by. Set a third pedal with the same CC number and value. Add an Adjust type, this time to Decrease that value when triggered and an amount to decrease by. Expression pedals defined in this way with the same CC number will show up on your monitor as 1 pedal with a rotary knob.

You can set the number of pedals to be displayed in each row of the grid from the menu.

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.

When you set a group name for 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.