Stretching the boundaries of reverb’s realm through dynamic and pitch control.
Nice core reverb sounds. Invites cool compositional and arrangement directions. High quality.
If you lack patience, it will be hard to unlock its coolest secrets.
$329
Gamechanger Audio Auto Reverb
gamechangeraudio.com
When the first Moog synthesizer appeared, it freaked out a lot of musicians—not least for the way it blurred the divisions between instruments and their roles. Was it percussion? A keyboard? A reed instrument? Many effects makers build from this philosophical foundation. The Latvian company Gamechanger often seems to revel in it—an attitude that’s manifest in the company’s Auto Series pedals, which includes the Auto Reverb.
There’s no reason you can’t use the Auto Reverb in a very straightforward fashion. The plate, spring, and hall settings are all very nice digital representations of their analog inspirations—and I’d be perfectly happy playing an instrumental surf set with the spring mode, for instance. But because you can control the parameters like the reverb’s level, decay, tone, and the filter with changes in pitch and dynamics, the Auto Reverb can function in highly orchestral ways, transforming itself from subtle to outlandish as a musical piece shifts in intensity or rises from low to high keys toward a blurred, hyper-spacious climax. While these attributes make the Auto Reverb a great fit for prepared guitar and conceptual pieces—and invites many themes and compositional ideas within those forms—it can just as easily be configured to create an especially dynamic and dramatic pop song arrangement on stage or in the studio that might otherwise be relegated to automations within a DAW. It’s fun to use, if not always intuitive. But knowing its ways can expand your musical options significantly.
Dynamic and pitch control of delay textures pave roads to new compositional and playing approaches in another unusual effect from Latvia’s foremost stompbox provocateurs.
Impressive control over parameters. Coaxes new playing and compositional approaches for players in a rut. High build quality.
Interrelationships between controls will be hard to grasp for many.
$329
Gamechanger Audio Auto Delay
gamechangeraudio.com
From the outset, it must be said there are easier ways to get a delay sound than using Gamechanger’s Auto Delay. But if simple echoes were the sole objective of this pedal, I doubtGamechanger would have bothered. As you may have gleaned from a listen to the company’sBigsby Pedal,PLASMA Pedal fuzz, orLIGHT Pedal reverb, the Riga, Latvia-based company rarely takes a conventional approach to anything they design or release. But what is “conventional” from a guitarist’s point of view, may be something quite different for musicians determined to bend notions of what sound and music are, how it’s made, and by what means.
By Gamechanger standards, the digital Auto Delay (along with its stablemates the Auto Reverb and Auto Chorus) is almost straightforward in concept. It utilizes existing concepts of dynamic delay, control voltage, and modular synthesis as essential parts of its functional underpinnings—which are not exactly unusual in stompbox design. Yet the way the Auto Delay’s functions interact make it feel and sound unique. And while not every player will want to take the time to explore the sometimes complex interplay between its functions, at its best, the Auto Delay prompts unorthodox thinking about the ways touch dynamics or pitch relate to the delay colors you can create, prompting unexpected compositional vectors and a kind of extra-dimensional relationship to the fretboard.
Beat of a Different Drum
Gamechanger’s path to building such unusual sound manipulation machines might seem a curious one when you consider that founder Ilja Krumins and his fellow founders Mārtiņš Meļķis and Kristaps Kalva are rockabilly heads with tastes that include the soulful earthiness of J.J. Cale. But the more accessible side of the Gamechanger design team’s musical interests likely informs the most approachable aspects of the Auto Delay. You can use it like you would any ordinary stompbox echo and take advantage of its three very distinct voices (tape, analog, and digital), copious 2-second delay time, and rangy tone control in order to fashion many compelling delay sounds. This is, needless to say, a vast underutilization of the Auto Delay’s powers.
Routing, Rearranging, and Raging Like a Lunatic
Though you can get lost in the Auto Delay (in good ways and bad), it isn’t necessarily the headache that its patch bay, LEDs, and many switches and knobs suggest. The idea behind the patch bay is simple: Routing a cable from one of the two dynamics or pitch automation input sockets to the level, tone, repeat, or time input sockets means that a change in, say, your picking intensity (dynamics) or where you play on the fretboard (pitch) increases or reduces the value for the parameter you linked to the dynamics or pitch socket. Even if you’ve not been indoctrinated in these methods via modular synthesis, it’s not as complicated as it sounds, and trial-and-error experimentation yields intuitive understanding of these interactions quickly.
The tape, analog, or digital voice can drastically reshape the tone and response of interactions. But so will the fast, rise, and gate dynamics modes, which determine the nature of the dynamic response. Setting thresholds for the dynamic and pitch response is easy. You simply hold down the “auto” footswitch or the bypass footswitch and twist the respective knobs until you reach the desired threshold, which is indicated by the adjacent LED. Like the other functions, getting a feel for how these thresholds work within your playing style takes time. As you might guess, we’ve really only discussed the most fundamental functions here. But in addition to these, you can use alt mode to assign different values to the secondary knobs and toggle between primary and secondary knobs using the auto switch. You can also manipulate the stereo spread or control the clock via MIDI.
The Verdict
The Auto Delay is not for the faint of heart or impatient. Grasping the interrelationships between the controls takes time. In fact, understanding how those interrelationships feel and respond musically will be more challenging for some than understanding how they work conceptually— which, while not elementary, can be sussed out with a careful read of the manual. But when you do find a rhythm and flow with the Auto Delay it can be richly rewarding and even meditative.
Because it can reshape your relationship with the fretboard and your sense of touch, this is a great tool for extracting yourself from ruts, whether in technique or mood. And if you’re a musical tinkerer, the Auto Delay can provide much of the same satisfaction and sense of discovery you experience working with a synthesizer—particularly if you enjoy working in the hardware realm rather than on a computer screen. One should consider the scores here as especially subjective and on a sliding scale. The Auto Delay’s many sonic and functional idiosyncrasies will be nectar to some and poison to others. And more than most pedals, you should probably have a firsthand experience with the thing before you decide how and if it fits your musical objectives. For many restless players, though, the Auto Delay will be a deep well of musical provocation and ideas.
The bass lord morphs and mutates between rhythm and lead parts with a hearty Wal 4-string, Gallien-Krueger crushers, and a pedalboard that could make Adam Jones jealous.
“Will the next Tool album take more than 10,000 days?”
That was an ongoing (and agonizing) joke for Tool fans that awaited the band’s fifth album following the release of 2006’s 10,000 Days. (A cruel clairvoyance of a title.) For those counting, when Fear Inoculum was finally delivered on August 30, 2019, it was just 4,868 days from their previous album. All crummy jokes aside, the anticipation of the album was real for a reason: the music. And the rhythmic cog of their constant contorting of depth and darkness is bassist Justin Chancellor.
Sure, drummer Danny Carey is a living legend bashing everything his large frame can smash and crash. Adam Jones transforms his guitar into a Hans Zimmer production with varied textures, temperaments, and traits his tone expresses. During shows, singer and lyricist Maynard James Keenan prowls in the shadows adding to the band’s musical mysticism. This triumvirate core dished out the punishing EP Opiate in 1992, and their 1993 debut full-length Undertow was more complex and calculated in its rage. But in 1995, when Justin Chancellor replaced Paul D’Amour on bass, Tool immediately expanded their dimensionality. The original three continued to dazzle and dumbfound listeners, but the addition of Chancellor and his pocket-minded role unlocked a collective vocabulary previously unspoken. Simply put, if Tool was an octopus, Chancellor was the head. The others could be momentarily independent tentacles exploring the melodic murkiness of their respective reaches, but when they needed to propel forward, Chancellor was steering. His lines are the base for the band’s groove and attitude that became a focal point on subsequent releases with 1996’s Ænima, 2001’s Lateralus, 2006’s 10,000 Days, and eventually 2019’s Fear Inoculum. The former three went triple-platinum, while the latter three were No. 1 on the Billboard 200. (Ænima landed in the No. 2 spot.)
If you ever catch yourself playing air guitar to Tool, you’re probably mimicking Chancellor’s parts. “Schism,” “The Pot,” “Forty Six & 2,” “H.,” “Fear Inoculum,” “Descending,” “The Grudge,” and plenty of others feature his buoyant bass riffs.
Chancellor’s tone has had a longstanding relationship with Wal basses, Gallien-Krueger amps, and Mesa/Boogie cabs. The evolving part of his rig has been his pedalboard. At this juncture of the band’s run supporting Fear Inoculum, Chancellor’s board is larger than his guitar-playing counterparts. Yet everything has a place and purpose. Some of it is duplicity, some of it is to avoid any required knob-turning during the show, and as we find out in the Rundown, some of it is just for fun. Grab a seat and get comfortable as Chancellor and his tech Pete Lewis walk PG’s elated Chris Kies through his live setup.
Brought to you by D’Addario: https://ddar.io/wykyk-rr
and D’Addario XPND Pedalboard: https://www.daddario.com/XPNDRR
Like a Glove
While recording Ænima, Chancelor borrowed a friend’s Wal bass that was originally fretless, but his pal did the dirty work of embedding frets into it. “That original bass’ tone immediately fit in with the band and covered the right area of sound,” remembers Chancellor. He promptly ordered his own replica of that build, and this is the second edition of it. The above 4-string has been his main bass for the last 15 years. It has a mahogany core, bird’s-eye maple caps, a neck incorporating mahogany, maple and rosewood, and a rosewood fretboard. Some minor changes to improve comfort and playability include lighter hardware and Luminlay fret markers. Chancellor’s basses take a custom set of Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky Bass strings that have the standard .045-.065-.85, but because they tune down to drop-D for most songs, he swaps in a .110 from the Power Slinky pack. And when they go to drop-C for their oldest material, he’ll put on a .135 string. He hammers on the strings with a custom Dunlop (1 mm) Tortex Tri pick. All his instrument cables come from Mogami.
Full-Circle StingRay
Chancellor recalls auditioning for Tool with an Ernie Ball StingRay, but it just didn’t work with the band’s sound at the time. Fast forward two decades and the StingRay has found a cozy place in the Tool setlist. The 2018 Music Man StingRay Special is used on “Descending” from Fear Inoculum. Anyone keen on details will notice the high-tech solution of duct tape and marker that allows Justin to incrementally notch up the volume during the song’s blossoming midsection.
Pretty Practice P
Justin scooped this beautiful 1963 Fender P bass from Norm’s Rare Guitars. He does have a small collection of old instruments, but they have to meet two requirements before he makes the buy: They have to sound amazing and they have to be players so he can “bang away on them” without remorse. He doesn’t play it onstage (the vintage P’s output doesn’t have enough horsepower for Tool), but he does bring it on tour because he finds it inspirational to play, so it’s often with him backstage, on the bus, or in the hotel room.
Welcome to the Thunderdome!
This configuration of Demeter preamps and Gallien-Krueger power amps has been the nucleus of power for Justin’s studio and stage sound for years. The Gallien-Krueger 2001RB heads each hit their own cabinet. The “clean” RB runs into a Mesa/Boogie RoadReady 8x10. The middle RB head in the rack is the “dirty” amp that goes into a prototype Mesa/Boogie 4x12 that is EQ’d gnarlier and takes all of Chancellor’s pedals. He feels the 10" speakers retain the integral low-end bass tone better than the 12s, while the larger speakers are better suited for offering his distorted or effected tones an overall warmth that can disappear in the 10s. (The bottom 2001RB is on deck in case either head fails.)
Above the G-Ks are the Demeter Bass Tube Preamplifiers that give FOH a pure sound to mix in as needed. (The second Demeter unit is a backup.)
And up to the Radial JD7 Injectors are amp switchers that also help remove noise, signal loss, or hum and buzz.
Mesa Mountains
Here are the two Mesa/Boogie cabs—the 8x10 on the left and the custom prototype 4x12 on the right.
Justin Chancellor's Pedalboard
This setup is either a bass player’s dream or nightmare, but for someone as adventurous as Chancellor, this is where the party starts. At a glance, you’ll notice many of his pedals are available at your favorite guitar store, including six Boss boxes, an Ernie Ball Volume Pedal, and MXR Micro Amp. Crucial foot-operated pedals are in blue with the Dunlop JCT95 Justin Chancellor Cry Baby Wah with a Tone Bender-style fuzz circuit (far left) and DigiTech Bass Whammy (middle). He really likes using the Tech 21 SansAmp GT2 for distortion and feedback when the Whammy is engaged or he’s playing up the neck. Covering delays are three pedals—he has the pink Providence DLY-4 Chrono Delay for “Pneuma” that is programmed to match Danny’s BPMs, which slightly increase during the song from 113 ms to 115 ms. The Boss DD-3s are set for different speeds with the one labeled “Faster” handling “The Grudge” and the other one doing more steady repeats. There’s a pair of vintage Guyatone pedals—the Guyatone VT-X Vintage Tremolo Pedal (Flip Series) and Guyatone BR2 Bottom Wah Rocker (a gift from Adam Jones). The Gamechanger Audio Plus pedal is used to freeze moments and allow Justin to grab onto feedback or play over something. The Boss GEB-7 Bass Equalizer and Pro Co Turbo Rat help reinforce his resounding, beefy backbone of bass tone. The MXR Micro Amp helps goose his grimy rumbles. The Boss LS-2 Line Selector is a one-kick escape hatch out of the complicated signal chain for parts of “Schism.” The Wal and Music Man stay in check with the TU-3S tuner, a pair of Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Pluses help bring things to life, and everything is wired up with EBS patch cables.
Shop Justin Chancellor's Rig
Music Man StingRay Special HH
Dunlop JCT95 Justin Chancellor Cry Baby Wah
Gamechanger Audio Plus Pedal
Boss DD-3 Digital Delay
Boss BF-2 Flanger
Boss CE-5 Chorus Ensemble
Boss GEB-7 Bass Equalizer
ProCo Turbo Rat
Tech 21 SansAmp GT2
DigiTech Bass Whammy
MXR Micro Amp
Boss LS-2 Line Selector
Ernie Ball VP Junior 250K
Boss TU-3S Tuner
JHS Switchback A/B Effects Loop Switcher
Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus
Radial JD7 Injector