New Pedals: Hungry Robot’s The Wash

Iowa based Hungry Robot Pedals has been active since 2012, with owner Eric Laverne Junge slowly refining its rigorously hand made stompboxes, and gradually shifting  his attention from effects belonging to the gain realm to more sophisticated and experimental ones dealing with ambiance.

Guitarists into dreamy and “shoegazy” sounds should check out all his “Ambient Devices” (there’s a menu dedicated to them on the company’s website), but here we only have the space to focus on one effect, the latest offer called The Wash, which looks like a very interesting beast.

The pedals was conceived with the goal of creating, with just one pedal, an “organic, below-the-mix wash” you normally get by “stacking 3-4 reverb and delay pedals at the end of your chain.”  It consists of a tap-tempo delay with over 1000ms of delay time and a separate circuit – the actual “Wash” – which is activated through the right footswitch and mixed in through the big knob in the center.

The Wash circuit “adds reverb to the signal through a complicated network of internal feedback loops, subtle multi-head Binson effect,” and a “ripple effect” of sorts, which is an effect controlled by the “Ripple” knob, “in which each successive delay trail slowly scatters and transforms into reverb.” All this without compromising the clarity of the original signal.

The “Resonance” knob allows a fine tuning of the EQ and decay of the Wash. Check out the demo below!