With its all-analog tri-mode overdrive and three different clipping options, this pedal is designed to deliver a three-dimensional tone with added clarity.
"At lower gain settings, youāll get all of the crunchy tone you love about the original, but once you get above noon on the Gain control, thatās where the similarities stop. Now youāre in bass country, baby! Get ready to shake some walls and field some angry calls from your neighbors (just send them to voicemail). And much like the Plumes, this pedal offers three different clipping options for your desired low end face melting needs."
Mode 1 is symmetrical LED clipping that utilizes a pair of light emitting diodes. This is the crunchiest setting the Blumes has to offer. This signal is less compressed and way more open with tons of output for when you really want to go wild.
Mode 2 is a clean pure OpAmp gain boost mode. This eliminates the soft clipping diodes altogether and leaves you with straight OpAmp drive. This will be the loudest output with the fullest frequency response, which can be used as a clean boost when the Gain control is set below 11 oāclock.
Mode 3 is an asymmetrical silicon diode arrangement similar to the stock screamer but with more output and clean clarity, which provides more transparent tone. Using this mode gives a warmer low-end response and lower output. Itās fuzzier with half the output and is the most compressed. If you like the fuzzy ends of distortion with a clean undertone, youāll love this setting. We guarantee it.
Blumes Low Signal Shredder Bass Demo | EarthQuaker Devices
Tech Specs:
- Bass overdrive based on a modified Plumes
- Deep bass response
- Twice as much gain as the Plumes
- Features 3 different clipping options: symmetrical LED, asymmetrical silicon, and no diode OpAmp drive
- Operates on internal bipolar power for more headroom and signal integrity
- All-analog signal path
- True bypass
- Silent relay-based switching with Flexi-Switch Technology
- Lifetime warranty
- Current Draw: 25 mA
- Input Impedance: 10 MĪ©
- Output Impedance: 100 Ī©
- USA Retail Price: $99.00
Each Blumes pedal is forged in the deepest, lowest caverns of Akron, Ohio, USA, and comes with a lifetime warranty.
For more information, please visit earthquakerdevices.com.
Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if youāre not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an āintelligent pitch-changerā that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ā80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. Itās essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is Ā±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and itās also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the deviceās guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days itās not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000ās capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymonās āshimmerā effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If youāre ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000ās singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what youāve won!)
āIf youāre ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000ās singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.ā
But thereās another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. Itās easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which theyāre mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isnāt always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offerāand I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, thatās a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions donāt quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) Itās all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists wonāt be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations existāEventideās own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhereāand youāve got the timeāfire it up, wait for the distinctive āclickā of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
