One of the coolest new product we saw at NAMM was right in our own booth down in Hall E – yes, we were in Anaheim with our Stompbox Exhibit featuring 11 boutique manufacturers.
Stomp Labs, a Canadian manufacturer, debuted its first pedal, the MaX O.D., part of an upcoming series called “XPressWay,” which is said to produce “the world’s first fully expression enabled guitar pedals.”
The MaX O.D. sounds good, but what’s really mind blowing about it is what it lets you do to control it – something that opens a lot of creative options for the guitarists with experimental inclinations.
If you connect an expression pedal to this baby, you’ll be able to do a couple of things you can’t do with any other pedal: tapping once on any of the three knobs (Volume, Gain and Tone) activates the control through the expression pedal, while tapping twice on any of them activates a “reverse” control – i.e. the knob will act as if it’s 100% up when the pedal is at 0% and vice versa. A green light on top of the knob indicates normal control, a blue one reversed control.
This means that you’ll be able to control with just one expression pedal one, two or all three parameters, in whichever fashion you wish (normal or reversed).
On top of that, an extra function a little too complicated to explain here allows you to set the upper and lower threshold for each knob connected to the expression pedal. This would allow you for example to set the minimum volume at – say – 25% when the expression pedal is fully down and the maximum at – say – 75% when it’s fully up, and adjust any knob with its own independent value.
I guess these guys are right when they claim they are doing something new with stompboxes. They already have a phaser pedal in the works and almost ready called OmniPhase, but I personally can’t wait for them to apply this expression madness to a filter pedal – there’s potentially a “triple wah” waiting around the corner!!!
