Can what’s arguably the most creative pedal maker of this decade make the most boring effect ever exciting? Enter the Chase Bliss Clean and find out.
Clean is a studio-grade, two-stage stereo analog compressor with an out-of-the-box approach that – to quote the builder – “brings the interactivity of distortion circuits to a clean signal.”
The name “Clean” therefore is an oxymoron: this circuit is all about introducing tasteful distortion (“from the touch sensitivity of an overdrive to the unwieldy response of a fuzz”) and also EQ and Auto-Swells to your signal, in stable or dynamic ways.
Clean can be used as a classic compressor or as a limiter (or both at once, since each channel includes both circuits). Or as a tremolo, swell, or/and noise gate if you use its more sophisticated features. These are too many to list in this article, but their depth can be grasped from this image of the DIP switches’ controls on the back panel:
Attack and release are mostly self-adjusting, just like in the venerable Teletronics LA2A, automatically adjusting to your playing – although there is room for some tweaking via the Attack knob and Release toggle.
Other noteworthy features include:
- a sidechain input with a separate footswitch, allowing integration with external instruments/effects
- emphasis filters delivering cassette-style noise reduction
- MIDI, CV and Expression control
- presets
- internal modulation of any or all its knobs
Check out the videos below.
