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Author Archive
The original Plus Pedal was one of those things that felt like a secret weapon — piano-style sustain for any instrument, wrapped in a brass footpedal that made you feel like you were doing something physical. It wasn’t a freeze pedal. It was smarter. It grabbed the tail end of your playing and held it there, organic and alive. The Gamechanger Plus Pedal II keeps that soul and rebuilds everything around it. What stayed. The brass pedal is still there — gradual optical control, smooth across its whole range. The core idea hasn’t changed: press down after a note or chord, and the pedal captures the tail of your sound and sustains it. It’s still a “smart looper,” not a glitchy freeze. It still works on guitar, synth, violin, whatever you plug in. The housing is still tour-tough. What changed. The engine is completely new. The original’s spectral sampling was good. The Plus II’s is best-in-class — faster, more accurate, better at preserving timbre and dynamics. No artifacts. No glitches. Just clean, natural sustain. The controls expanded significantly. There’s a Layers knob now — 1 to 10 layers, or infinity for endless stacking. Auto Layer Catch lets you keep your […]... Click on the title for more
When it came out, the Timeline was the delay pedal that made other delay pedals feel like toys. The Strymon Timeline MX doesn’t replace it — it mutates it. The original’s twelve machines are still here — dTape, dBucket, Digital, Dual, Pattern, Reverse, Trem, Filter, Diffuse, Ice, Duck, and Lo-Fi — but they’ve been rebuilt from the ground up. More headroom. Better fidelity. The same familiar sounds, just deeper and cleaner than they had any right to get. But the new stuff is where it gets interesting. Five new engines that weren’t in the original. Oil Can is the one that’ll stop you mid-play. It models the warble and compression of those old oil can delay units — the ones that were obsolete before most of us were born. It’s greasy, it’s unstable, and it sounds like a machine that’s trying to remember how to work. Spectral is something else entirely. It breaks your delay repeats into frequency bands and lets you process them independently. Think shimmer without the cliché — ethereal without being saccharine. Drum is a modeled analog delay based on a drum echo unit. It’s darker, punchier, more percussive than the tape models. Slapback on this thing […]... Click on the title for more
Most samplers just record what you play and spit it back. This one watches you. The AC Noises Continua is a stereo dynamic sampler and multi-effect that listens to how you hit the strings, how hard, how fast, and reacts while you’re still playing. It captures your repeats and twists them in real time — mix, tempo, pitch, sustain, freeze, glitch, dimension, lo-fi, downsampling, reverb, smear, filter. All of it happening as you play, not after. Meanwhile, your dry signal stays clean. Or you can route it through the multi-effect section too, if you want everything swimming in the same weird water. It was born from a collaboration between AC Noises and Andrea Degli Esposti from BunkerNoise, and you can feel that in the hands-on layout. Primary and secondary parameters everywhere. You can dial in sensitivity, threshold, attack, release, stereo spread, lo-fi modulation depth, reverb decay — the kind of control you’d expect from a rack unit, not a pedal. Forward or reverse. Full repeats or ghostly tails that fade like they’re embarrassed to exist. And when you need things to fall apart, there’s a momentary tilt function that just scatters everything. Two onboard presets. Full MIDI over mini-jack and […]... Click on the title for more
The Electro-Harmonix Percolator is a re-elaboration of a circuit so legendary that most of its history is still guesswork. Original came out of a Milwaukee repair shop in the ’70s. Rare. Gooped. Cult status. EHX took that weird little monster and gave it modern controls without cleaning up its personality. Three knobs, one switch. Harmonics controls input gain—from mild overdrive to full destruction. Bias adjusts the gain circuit bias, which means you can dial in everything from smooth drive to pseudo-octave nonsense to Velcro gated fuzz that sputters and dies like it’s angry at you. Balance sets your output level. The Drive/Fuzz toggle lifts or engages the clipping diodes. In Drive mode, it’s a transistor drive—raw, chewy, crunchy. In Fuzz mode, the diodes clamp down and it gets nasty. There’s an internal trim pot under the hood for sub-octave enhancement and extra gain. You have to open the pedal to get at it, which is how it should be—tweak it once, set it, forget it. Footswitch does latching or momentary. Press and hold for a burst of fuzz, release and it’s gone. Useful for stabbing a single ruined note into an otherwise clean passage. $129. 9V center negative. True […]... Click on the title for more
A thousand dollars. For a delay pedal. Let that sink in.... Click on the title for more
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Red Panda has spent years proving that digital doesn't have to mean cold. The Raster was their deep-dive pitch delay - a brilliant box with menus, alternate functions, and enough parameters to make a synth programmer weep with joy . It was also, for the stomp-and-go guitarist, a lot.... Click on the title for more
