MXR Layers Review

Unlike the simplest sustain pedals, the Layers enables the player to significantly mutate sustained notes and textures. You can add blends of delay and chorusing that aren’t perceptibly either effect, which creates uncommon-sounding stacks and waves of guitar sound. The Layers pedal takes practice to use with precision, but even partial command of its time-warping capabilities makes it rewarding to use, and it’s relatively easy to dial in chaotic—or fluid and ordered—sustain and harmonizing effects to suit your whims.

Blink Twice If You Understand

Dive straight into Layers without a peek at the quick-start guide and you might fast end up swimming in washes of repeats and harmonic tangles. At first, it might not even be apparent what a layer is supposed to be, particularly because the delay and modulation effects can be so prominent. Essentially a layer is a snapshot of the sound you’re playing as you trigger the effect—either by pressing the soft-relay footswitch or by dynamic picking, depending on where you set the threshold control. (This type of functionality will be familiar to players that use envelope filters.) From there, you can control the length of the layer with the decay control, the wet/dry mix, and the rate at which the layer becomes audible, with the attack knob. By getting a feel for these functions, you can use Layers to predictably create droning and harmonizing accompaniment to what you play. But several additional features enable dramatic alteration of the shape and color of your layers. The “single” button allows switching between a default mode, in which as many as three layers can play concurrently, and another that allows only a single layer at a given time.

Third-Eye Super Vision

The features listed here make the Layers seem more imposing than it is. As I said at the top, you may stare at the pedal a lot to see when the attack threshold is crossed or see which layers have been activated in the multi-layer mode. But the longer you work with Layers, the more you can do by feel. Getting a feel for what rate of swell and decay are right for a given guitar part can change from tune to tune, which makes the absence of presets a slight inconvenience. But it’s not terribly hard to make these adjustments in between tunes or even on the fly, when you’re comfortable. If you elect to go with a single set up and stick with it, you can still add much dynamic control depending on where you set the threshold. Configuring the pedal with a low- to medium-sensitive threshold, three available layers, conservative mix levels, and more generous delay times means you can move between gentle passages where you ride over misty, slow-fading overtone backgrounds or forceful, blown-out ones—all by varying pick intensity. It’s a much more interesting way to build quiet-to-loud dynamics than just switching on, say, an extra drive pedal and reverbs simultaneously. And that flexibility can help you respond to a live performance with extra sensitivity to the mood of a piece. (By the way, it bears mentioning that Layers is often more effective at the start of an effects chain, where it will respond most directly to your input.)

Layers can be subtle. I enjoyed using low mix levels, long decay settings, a permissive threshold, and slow-ramping rise times to create hazy harmonizing trails. I also loved the avalanches of deeply modulating, colliding, and completely unsubtle soundwaves you can slather over a still-coherent melody. Loopers will love building stacks of rising, falling, swelling, and swirling passages of all of these textures that roll like storm clouds. In fact, a two-pedal setup of Layers and a looper will make a simple guitar and amplifier weirder and more otherworldly by orders of magnitude.

The Verdict

The Layers inhabits a sweet middle ground between a simple single-function sustain pedal and overflowing loopers or multi-delays. And though you can utilize very prominent harmonizing voices, it’s generally grainer, less loaded, and more unique than a shimmer reverb. It’s these very uncommon voices and sounds, as well as a capacity for intuitive operation, that make Layers so alluring.