The Old Blood Noise Beam Splitter marks the return of the Oklahoma-based company to larger, more tweakable and creative “organic” multi-effect pedals, after a 3-pedal foray into quirky compact releases (aka the BL Series). Although “quirky” and “creative” are part of this builder’s identity.
This very “knobby” unit consists of :
- Transistor Overdrive
- Soft-clipping Distortion
- Hard-clipping Distortion
- 1 Chorus
- 1 Double tracker
Designed for both stereo and “trereo” use, it allows to blend and combine these 5 effects to give guitarists a rich, multitracked sound from a single pedal.
Each gain effect has its independent gain, volume, and tone controls. The “triple tracking” effect comes into play with the delay options available on the transistor and soft-clipping channels, allowing you to introduce up to 125ms of delay for subtle time deviations between your parallel signal paths.
For added versatility and creativity, the Beam Splitter includes a Deviate control for introducing random shifts to your delay times and Decay controls for tweaking feedback and repeats in the delays.
While the pedal can be use to deliver a huge sound, it’s flexible enough to do so much more than that, being capable of producing strange filters, flangers, lo-fi vibratos, and trailing slap-back echoes using the delay controls.
As a bonus, the insane routing capabilities will fire the imagination of guitarists who like to work with more than one amp: you can choose to sum all the Beam Splitter’s channels to mono or split them through dedicated jacks for stereo setups, wet-dry-wet amp configurations, or any combination you can dream up.
Check out how it sounds in the videos below!
[Wanna get this baby and be supportive? Buy it through our Perfect Circuit affiliate program – at no extra cost.]
Old Blood Noise Beam Splitter, Builder’s Notes
Beam Splitter takes one signal and makes three copies of it, each with differing overdrive voices and delay times. It is specifically our way of creating a huge sound out of a regular one. Output can be kept in parallel mono or split individually to three places. While the goal is singular bigness, you can also find strange filters, flangers, lo-fi vibratos, and trailing slap-back echoes using the delay controls and blending everything to taste.
Controls include:
- Gain, Volume, and Tone to shape the amount of distortion, overall volume, and brightness of each drive section
- Time to introduce delays up to 125mS on the green and blue sections
- Decay to add intense filtering or trailing delays, depending on Time
- Deviate to randomly vary the delay time, giving a more natural feel and chorus effect
- Top jacks for summed parallel mono output or split output for each drive
- Expression jack to externally control Deviate knob
- Soft-touch bypass footswitch for true bypass and minimal switch noise
- For more information, see the Beam Splitter manual available here.
- Requires 9V DC center negative 2.1mm jack power supply capable of 150mA (not included).
- The art of Beam Splitter is by Dustin Charles.
