Thanks to a bunch of forward-thinking builders, in recent years, granular and glitch pedals have experienced an exponential growth comparable to no other effect niche. Norway’s Pladask Elektrisk has been at the center of this phenomenon and their new release BAKLENGS continues and develops it.
Presented as the final release in a trilogy preceded by BAKVENDT and BAKFRAM, this is a pedal that offers more dynamic control through footswitch options while avoiding program resets when changing the octave setting.
At its heart it’s granular processor featuring a series of effects: delay, time-stretch, pitch transposer, modulation, forward/reverse, and – of course – a granular looper, which is a delay that loops a section of your performance, cuts it in several “granules” and rearranges these parts either randomly or following a set of instructions. It also has a freeze effect, which is expected in this kind of circuit.
The Clock knob sets the sampling rate, grain size, modulation speed, and delay of your sample, which can vary from 2700 to 550 ms. Adjusting this knob while playing will pitch-shift any audio processed by the circuit.
The Time knob has a double function: from full counter-clockwise to noon it increases the delay time while turning it clockwise from noon it will time-stretch your sampled audio.
The Loop knob acts as a decay parameter, taking your repeats from nothing at zero, to an increasingly repeating delay, up to infinite repeats (loop) at maximum settings, when the audio is repeated indefinitely while allowing new audio to be written to the memory.
A series of Toggles expand the creative range of the pedal, offering reverse, shuffling and forward granular delay/stretch (Mid Toggle) -1, regular and +1 octave pitch shifting (Right Toggle), and two different loop configurations with either maximum direct feedback or maximum looping feedback (Left toggle). Linked to the latter is the left footswitch, which “Overrides the LOOP parameter according to the left toggle switch: holding down the switch for more than 500ms will only momentarily change the status.
You can read the manual for a more in-depth description of the functions.
If you are wondering how the Pladask Elektrisk Baklengs, you can hear it in the video below. We added it to our article about the Best Glitch, Stutter and Granular pedals and also to our popular category of Creative Pedals.
