Croatian pedal builder Polarbear Effects sure likes to mix things up a little. The two stompboxes on the company’s roster are very creative devices wisely blending several circuits, with the goal of creating very musical and unique effects. Enter the new Drowner, a fuzz/bitcrusher/shimmery reverb.
The circuit starts with a heavy silicon-based fuzz placed first the chain and featuring its own footswitch – the right one.
After the fuzz, you have the Bitcrusher and Reverb, controlled through the left footswitch. Their routing order can be changed through the Order toggle, while the Crush switch allows you to turn off the bitcrusher.
Placing the bitcrusher before the reverb enables you to have a tone that’s very reactive to pick attack and that gets then softened by the reverb. The other way around you get a more grainy sound where the reverb trails activate the bitcrusher.
To make things even more interesting, the effect features an FX loop that allows you to insert external pedals after the fuzz.
Hear the otherworldly sounds of the Polarbear Effects Drowner in the videos below, we added it to our article about the Best Bitcrusher Pedals on the market.
Drowner is a fuzz/bitcrusher/reverb multi-effect guitar pedal built to satisfy all your other-wordly heavy reverb dreams of crushed shimmery soundscape.
Heavy silicon based FUZZ is always the first effect in the chain that can be independently engaged with a right footswitch.
This pedal was designed for you to build your pedalboard around it, featuring an FX loop that requires a TRS Y-cable: stereo male to dual mono TS cables, you can put any additional effects between FUZZ and BITCRUSHER/REVERB. (R is Send, T is Return).
BITCRUSHER & REVERB are engaged with the left footswitch, but BITCRUSHER can be bypassed with a CRUSH toggle switch.
You can change the order of BITCHRUSHER & REVERB in the effects chain with the ORDER switch.
FCR setting enables you to have the bitcrusher very reactive to pick attack that further goes into reverb.
FRC lets the reverb trails activate the bitcrusher.VOLUME controls does not affect the FUZZ directly, it controls the output volume of BITCRUSHER & REVERB at the end of the effects chain.
POWER
This product should be used with high-quality isolated power supply. It uses 9V DC negative center 2.1mm barrel. Unregulated power supplies as well as higher voltages may result in suboptimal noise performance and even damage your unit.
Current draw for this pedal is ~160mA. Please don’t underpower the unit.SIZE (L X W X H)
11.7 x 9.2 x 5.7 cm
4.6 x 3.62 x 2.24 inch
1590BB enclosure
