Kent, England (February 28, 2014) -- Following on from the massive success of the reissue of the Vintage Fuzz Pedal, Rotosound are proud to announce the launch of a rainbow collection of six new and original retro guitar effects pedals. The green Wobbler tremolo, the yellow King Henry phaser, the red Pusher compressor, the blue Crusader chorus, plus the black Aftermath analogue delay and Leveller EQ pedals.
All have been designed in conjunction with the award winning technical guru, John Oram of VOX and Trident fame. John has spent nearly half a century developing innovative electronic musical equipment and has been responsible for a number landmark custom-designed products.
Using John’s considerable knowhow, and Rotosound’s attention to detail, all the pedals are built to deliver studio grade performances, are intuitive to use and have impressive capabilities. The pedals incorporate todays technology for consistency and sustainability combined with real 1960’s design for style and tone. They are hand wired in the UK by Rotosound using authentic components. Each pedal is finished in a durable pressed steel box in a distinctive range of eye-catching coloured hammer powder coatings.
The Wobbler tremolo pedal has a smooth range control of rate and depth, vintage optical attenuator and unique control of its silicon and germanium signal paths. This provides a variety of sounds that captures a vintage valve amp tremolo tone.
Making it easier to sweep through the entire audio range from shimmery to vibrant, twisting to resonant guitar is the new King Henry phaser pedal. This comes with PEAK, a control for the wider ranging of phase effects.
Next is the Pusher compressor pedal. Its audio dynamics controller provides noise reduction helping to get a more transparent tone and help increase sustain. It aids the preservation of that essential essence of the string being plucked.
Allowing chorus effect to be mixed from minimum to maximum with LEVEL control is the Crusader chorus pedal. This makes guitars sings with sparkly, lush sounds that have a rich smooth quality.
The hybrid Aftermath with its warm analogue delay and precision digital circuitry gives superb modern control and fine-tuning capabilities helping to emulate a retro delay tone.
Perfect for tone shaping is the Leveller, EQ pedal. With its silicon and germanium signal parts it provides constant bandwidths on either side of frequencies. With a choice of Boom, Fuzz and Honk options, there’s a wide range of tonal options available.
The new pedals are shipping March 2014.
For more information:
Rotosound
EBS BassIQ Blue Label Triple Envelope Filter Pedal
The EBS BassIQ produces sounds ranging from classic auto-wah effects to spaced-out "Funkadelic" and synth-bass sounds. It is for everyone looking for a fun, fat-sounding, and responsive envelope filter that reacts to how you play in a musical way.
Reverend Vernon Reid Totem Series Electric Guitar - Shaman
Silos features six presets, tap tempo, one full second of delay time, and three voices—two of which are styled after bucket-brigade and tape-delay sounds. In the $150 price category, it’s not unusual for a digital delay to leave some number of those functions out. And spending the same money on a true-analog alternative usually means warm, enveloping sounds but limited functionality and delay time. Silos, improbably perhaps, offers a very elegant solution to this can’t-have-it-all dilemma in a U.S.-made effect.
A More Complete Cobbling Together
Silos’ utility is bolstered by a very unintimidating control set, which is streamlined and approachable. Three of those controls are dedicated to the same mix, time, and repeats controls you see on any delay. But saving a preset to one of the six spots on the rotary preset dial is as easy as holding the green/red illuminated button just below the mix and preset knobs. And you certainly won’t get lost in the weeds if you move to the 3-position toggle, which switches between a clear “digital” voice, darker “analog” voice, and a “tape” voice which is darker still.
“The three voices offer discernibly different response to gain devices.”
One might suspect that a tone control for the repeats offers similar functionality as the voice toggle switch. But while it’s true that the most obvious audible differences between digital, BBD, and tape delays are apparent in the relative fidelity and darkness of their echoes, the Silos’ three voices behave differently in ways that are more complex than lighter or duskier tonality. For instance, the digital voice will never exhibit runaway oscillation, even at maximum mix and repeat settings. Instead, repeats fade out after about six seconds (at the fastest time settings) or create sleepy layers of slow-decaying repeats that enhance detail in complex, sprawling, loop-like melodic phrases. The analog voice and tape voice, on the other hand, will happily feed back to psychotic extremes. Both also offer satisfying sensitivity to real-time, on-the-fly adjustments. For example, I was tickled with how I could generate Apocalypse Now helicopter-chop effects and fade them in and out of prominence as if they were approaching or receding in proximity—an effect made easier still if you assign an expression pedal to the mix control. This kind of interactivity is what makes analog machines like the Echoplex, Space Echo, and Memory Man transcend mere delay status, and the sensitivity and just-right resistance make the process of manipulating repeats endlessly engaging.
Doesn't Flinch at Filth
EarthQuaker makes a point of highlighting the Silos’ affinity for dirty and distorted sounds. I did not notice that it behaved light-years better than other delays in this regard. But the three voices most definitely offer discernibly different responses to gain devices. The super-clear first repeat in the digital mode lends clarity and melodic focus, even to hectic, unpredictable, fractured fuzzes. The analog voice, which EQD says is inspired by the tone makeup of a 1980s-vintage, Japan-made KMD bucket brigade echo, handles fuzz forgivingly inasmuch as its repeats fade warmly and evenly, but the strong midrange also keeps many overtones present as the echoes fade. The tape voice, which uses aMaestro Echoplex as its sonic inspiration, is distinctly dirtier and creates more nebulous undercurrents in the repeats. If you want to retain clarity in more melodic settings, it will create a warm glow around repeats at conservative levels. Push it, and it will summon thick, sometimes droning haze that makes a great backdrop for slower, simpler, and hooky psychedelic riffs.
In clean applications, this decay and tone profile lend the tape setting a spooky, foggy aura that suggests the cold vastness of outer space. The analog voice often displays an authentic BBD clickiness in clean repeats that’s sweet for underscoring rhythmic patterns, while the digital voice’s pronounced regularity adds a clockwork quality that supports more up-tempo, driving, electronic rhythms.
The Verdict
Silos’ combination of features seems like a very obvious and appealing one. But bringing it all together at just less than 150 bucks represents a smart, adept threading of the cost/feature needle.
EarthQuaker Devices Silos Multi-generational Time Reflection Delay Pedal
