The Discomfort Designs Phantom Limb is an interesting and creative dual effect sporting separate delay and looper channels, built by a boutique company out of Tucson Arizona specializing in non-ordinary stompboxes.
The looper side has its own footswitch and consists of nine separate loopers featuring individual random playback triggers, and all you can do to control this parameter is to set their Length and the probability of them “triggering” via the Chance knob. We will assume it’s your signal that triggers them, and the higher the Chance knob, the more loopers will be triggered while you are playing, in ways you may or may not learn to control.
Let’s call that channel a (happy) accident waiting-to-happen machine.
Thing is, when happy accidents actually happen, you may want to freeze them and repeat them, and with the phantom Limb, you can do that by locking the buffer, which gets the ‘Length’ and ‘Chance’ knobs to scan through the buffer and dynamically change the length.
To further expand the pedal sonic palette, the looper is followed by a 3-mode delay channel, offering Clean, drifting Modulation, and Pitch-shifted algorithms, and controlled via the Time and Regen (feedback) knobs.
There’s also a 3-way filter that can be set to work as ByPass, Low Pass, or High Pass.
Check out what this creative pedal can do in the videos below.
