Best of NAMM 2017: Chase Bliss Audio’s Brothers Analog Gain Stage Pedal

With regular sized pedals featuring incredibly deep functionality (but still holding on to – as they like to say – an “analog heart”), in just a few years Chase Bliss Audio (established in 2013) has been able to create a new standard for the beloved stompbox format.

At the NAMM 2017 show, the Minnesota based company was one of the most hyped as far as guitar effects go. They took the opportunity to unveil their first ever distortion pedal, called Brothers, a stompbox that, in keeping with their previous designs, opens up worlds of options, this time in the gain realm.

Brothers is the product of a collaboration with Resonant Electronic: each company built one of the two JFET / IC analog channels, each featuring three separate circuits accessible through a toggle switch, for a total of “six unique boost, drive, or fuzz circuits in one small enclosure.”

On top of that:

The pedal can be routed in thirty-three distinct ways, including mixing them in parallel or changing the order of the effects.

[…] you can save everything and recall presets instantly, on-the-fly either on the pedal or with MIDI.

Every knob and switch is connected to a little digital brain while your guitar signal stays 100% analog the entire time…

At $349, this is by no means an affordable stompbox, but – if you like how it sounds – it may as well become the do-it-all distortion pedal, in particular for studio musicians who need to adapt their sound to different songs and aren’t thrilled with digital emulations.