Chase Bliss effects pedals

Update on Onward from their latest newsletter:

„We are still on track to start shipping these in mid June, probably some time during the week of June 17th.“

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Some rather pretty demonstration of the freeze function on the onward pedal. Can’t wait for it to ship!

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Wish I could post pretty hyperlinks, but when the Digitakt comes in… :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKiCC0Yt8jw&t=1s

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The drum part of this is the main effect I was hoping to get out of this box.

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Is it this video?

Some rudimentary DT and DN beats in the end. Pretty excited now, sound great for mangling beats!

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Just received the shipping notification for Onward. Very psyched, and I hope it’ll arrive on Saturday as I’ve got absolutely nothing planned for Sunday.

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Oh sweet, that means you’ll have it for rehearsal on Tuesday :heart_eyes:. Hope mine will be here soon too, no notification yet. Gotta say I’m hyped after that last demo!

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Onward has shipped! Or at least I got a notification today

So excited!

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The first onwards are out in the wild. Pretty cool demo with guitar and saxophone.

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Mine was shipped on Monday and arrived today :heart_eyes:. Hope I can take it for a little spin tomorrow before I‘m gone for a week …

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So I played around with it for about an hour, only with synths so far. Of course this is honeymoon and all, but I‘m really impressed and having fun so far. It is really musical because it superbly reacts to dynamics in the sound. Of course that might work best when playing a guitar, but it also sounds great when reacting to synth sequences and messing with knobs on the synth and the pedal.

I think it can do the Microcosm thing of playing along with you almost like another musician. It can also sound quite granular-esque. The stereo spread is excellent. The effects change a bit too much with minor knob movements for my taste, let’s see how well you can dial in more subtle stuff. Of course, there’s always the mix knob. I recommend setting the dip switch to latch so that you don’t have to hold the main stomp switches for latching loops. Really looking forward to exploring it with vocals and synths and learning to control it.

Edit: You can really get a lot out of only one simple synth by just latching one or two sides. Just latch an interesting loop, switch presets and play over it. If one side is still sampling dynamically, things will blend nicely and your sound will be really full and moving. One thing I wish I had was independent control over some of both sides‘ parameters like spread and mix. And a hi pass filter for each side. Maybe there’s some stuff possible through dip switches though, I haven’t studied the manual well. But this pedal seems ideal for a bigger format about the size of a Microcosm with a few more knobs.

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sorry for the self promo…but I thought this might be interesting for ZOIA owners who are lusting over ONWARD.
You can make stuff that the ONWARD does on ZOIA, a more talented programmer can probably do a better job than me, nevertheless:
https://www.youtube.com/live/JdUPZXPGyzc?si=PfMB_DKPbl8qxXn2

(why can’t I embed videos anymore)

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Some of that is possible with the hidden functions of the knobs. Keep both foot switches pressed, with the mix knob you can adjust the relative volume of each channel, counterclockwise for more glitch, clockwise for more freeze. Also, with both foot switches pressed, flipping the animate toggle will determine which channel is affected by the octave, texture, animate and EQ, left for glitch, right for freeze, and the middle position of the toggle for both (default). Also, there are dipswitches for side chaining the freeze channel to the glitch channel or ducking both FX to the input signal. Really great and customizable, so I do recommend to get familiar with the manual, as there’s lots of cool things you can do. As with my other CB pedals, I treat the two onboard presets more like default dipswitch/hidden settings configurations. So for onward, I’ve set it up so that the right preset has the reverse and side chaining dip switches set to on, and the left preset has the double time and ducking dip switches set to on.

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Nice tip!

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Great advice there! I usually steer clear of the hidden functions of (CBA) pedals as it gets harder and harder to grasp what‘s actually happening and what each knob does or doesn‘t do. The preset idea is a good one, let’s see what I can do with these.

Again, with each new pedal, it feels more like they’ve clearly outgrown this format and should offer something bigger with more knobs and regular DIN MIDI plus two mono in and out.

I quite like the small footprint of the CB pedals. And at least for their recent pedals, the secondary knob functions are actually labelled, albeit somewhat inconsistently. Lossy has all of them labelled, but onward omits error blend and EQ. Maybe they were added late to the firmware? Genloss2 has additional labels for the classic mode, but lots of hidden knob functions I always forget.

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Fair enough. So you can fit more of them on your board :nerd_face:. I also like the small footprint but get frustrated quickly when using them. I also hate that the inputs and outputs are not on the back, but I guess most guitarists would hate them to be there.

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I find Lossy to be very easy to navigate… but I guess it has less hidden features the. The rest of the pedals…

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I agree. CB nailed every aspect on lossy imho. It’s a great user interface, looks very cool, sounds unique, and is a very versatile pedal with its filter, reverb, loss modes, and limiter.

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:100:

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