Music is “the art of combining sounds”. Great! What is an art? What is a sound?
An art is not The Art: an art is a domain where people work to improve the quality of their creation, and/or the way they create their achievements. Yes, music is a domain of creation, and, for the lucky ones, achievement.

The Art is something different, which has several definitions: a quest for beauty, a free-expression area, a way to generate emotions… This debate would take us away from what we are here for: Rockman gear.

So let's assume that creating and playing music is a structured activity, that has some rules and some objectives – even if these objectives are not explicit, and if the rules are, very often, made to be broken.

Sound… when this classic definition (combining sounds) was proposed, a sound was clearly something consistent: a sound has a timbre (i.e. a frequency spectrum), a dynamic structure (we call that an envelope now), and a duration. In other terms, a sound was what we would call today... a note!

In these ancient times, the rest was simply “noise”: every aural stimulus that has no complete structure.

Of course, there is no law prohibiting the use of “noises” within music! But if you don’t have a structure based on notes, can we still call that music? Do we call photography or computer graphics “painting”? No, we don’t: we have other names for these alternate artistic domains.

Well, it would have been fair to create new names for these domains where people create sonic opuses without instruments and without notes… For example, when you listen to "Let it be", then to “Revolution 9”, a new term, something like an “aural collage”, is certainly be more relevant.

There are several definitions of music, and musical gear can accordingly be designed with hundreds of different methods. It’s always created to help musicians in their daily concern: combine sounds, no matter what you call music or sound.

Rockman gear was created in conformance with the classic definition of music, as it is exposed above. Rockman gear is not here to generate random tones or explore technical possibilities. It was created to provide a better control of their tone to the guitar players. Nothing else. Tom Scholz has one device that can generate weird noises and sounds: the Hyperspace Pedal. But it’s the only effect that was not included in the Rockman line…