Beetronics finally went digital. After years of building analog dirt boxes in those signature hand-painted enclosures, the California-via-Brazil hive unleashed the Pollinator Hazee Delay—their first fully digital pedal . And thank fuck. Because you can’t do what this does with bucket brigades and capacitors.
Here’s the twist: most modulated delays wiggle the delay time. Pitch goes up, pitch goes down, wobble wobble, everyone’s happy. Beetronics said nah. The Hazee modulates the signal first—filter or tremolo – then sends that moving, breathing sound into the delay line. The repeats aren’t echoes with vibrato. They’re copies of a sound that was already fucked up before it echoed. That’s the whole difference. That’s why it feels alive instead of just “vintage.”
Eight modes on a central rotary. Four filter-based, four tremolo-based. Forward, reverse, octave up, standard pitch – every combination you’d want. Modes 2 and 7 are the Queen Bees. Those read the delay buffer twice as fast as it records, spitting out octave-up repeats with strange internal rhythms. Push the Time knob past halfway and the original starts bleeding into the octave layer in ways that feel less like engineering and more like sorcery.
Five knobs. Time, Feedback, Mix, Modulation, Mode. No screens. No menus. No tap tempo, because that’s not what this is for . If you need locked-in quarter notes hitting exactly on 2 and 4, go buy a Boss. If you want delays that bloom into haze, that turn single notes into swarms, that blur the line between echo and atmosphere until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins – you’re home.
Two-forty-nine bucks. Mono only, because stereo would’ve doubled the price and the point. Hand-painted enclosures, same as the analog ones. The Beetronics Pollinator Hazee is the first of the Pollinator Series. More bees coming.
Plug it in. Turn knobs. Let it pollinate your board with sounds you haven’t heard yet.
