Alright, gearheads, strap in. For those who live and breathe inventive circuit design, the name Gamechanger Audio should immediately set your spidey-senses tingling. They’re the mad scientists who brought us the Plasma Pedal and the Motor Synth. Well, that same wellspring of Latvian innovation has spawned a new venture. Founded by former Gamechanger contributors Toms Lazdovskis and Matiss Tazans, Mentha Works has assembled an all-star team from the likes of Neural DSP and Darkglass. Their mission? To turn radical ideas into world-class, expressive instruments. And their first offering, the Monk Echo, is a statement of intent that is nothing short of breathtaking.
This isn’t just another delay/reverb pedal. The Monk Echo is a grand, spatial instrument that blends lush ambience with a genuinely groundbreaking feature: a vocal choir living inside your signal chain. Inspired by Baltic choral traditions, its “Monk Voice” section uses morphing formant filters to make your repeats ‘sing’ with male, female, or children’s vowel sounds. You can manually glide between vowels or let it respond dynamically to your playing, creating everything from a subtle, distant murmur to a full, responsive choral swell.
But the innovation doesn’t stop there. Instead of rigid algorithms, Monk Echo provides a deep bench of intuitive, interactive sound-shaping tools—from granular pitch shifting and reverse delay to musical degradation and stereo width control. The true game-changer, however, is the Advanced Macro Control system. Link multiple parameters to a single knob or expression pedal, and you can morph entire soundscapes seamlessly. An ingenious 8×8 dot display provides immediate visual feedback of every parameter movement, making complex sound design both performative and intuitive.
From warm tape echoes and shimmering verbs to distorted, self-oscillating walls of sound, the Monk Echo is an expressive powerhouse. With full MIDI, presets, and a stereo signal path, it’s a studio-grade sound design tool and a revolutionary performance instrument in one formidable package.
