Leviasynth is too complicated, and now glitch pedals are for bedroom producers who don’t play in bands and only aspire to bird chirp noises and random bullshit?
Ironic, considering that randomizers and generative functions are among the most requested features on just about every new box these days.
You know, the main riff in one of John Mayer’s biggest songs was done using an early arp/glitch algo, right?
The lack of imagination and baseless bellyaching here truly hurts my soul.
From where I’m standing (onstage with a band most nights, just to be clear), as a trem, delay, or bitcrusher alone this pedal has countless uses. And in this case, quite deliberately by design, you are given enough meaningful control to do not have to be at the mercy of completely random choices with this pedal.
Bless the creative people who brave this contempt and dare to bring these amazing tools into the world.
Collector/emitter is also really good if you like minimal talking in your demos
@JohntheSavage I didn’t mean to hit a nerve. I thought it was pretty clearly a joke. Ambient pedals in a band context can be interesting, but it takes a certain kind of collaborator to be cool with it, and you probably have to approach your instrument in a different way to make it work.
I’m in this camp. The envelope alone is reason enough for me, plus what you’ve said. That player-reactive thing creates great moments on stage, and one doesn’t have to have the mix knob cranked to have a subtle layer under your playing.
Sounds nice and does a lot of things…graphics are too distracting when you’re just glancing down to tweak stuff. Personally I much prefer the design of something like the Evil Pet. Looks cool to me, but being able to see and access the functionality takes priority
Wow, “glitch” has really grown up and become a proud taxpaying citizen.
“New age” is rather how I would describe those sounds. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
granular loopers/samplers/fx have been rinsed across the board, in all mediums and formats not just pedals.
i blame clouds lol
i dont even know if this is considered granular, probably not but either way
I actually dont hate the graphics, you will most likely stop reading the labels after getting used to it anyways
It’s not something I’m going to pick up, but I love that this collab happened. Hopkins has been consistent with pedal showcases (her second channel Harp Lady is all demos and such), and it’s cool that she got to put her own touch on it.
I started watching her when I was first looking into effects pedals and I felt like everything was aimed at guitar, or was put on a synth sound that was already too complex. Putting a plucked instrument through the pedals really lets them shine on their own.
The graphics are awesome. The labels aren’t super readable, but it’s not like you’re menu diving.
Agreed, I’m not sure how many others are doing harps through pedals, but she’s clearly in a niche space and continuously comes up with cool stuff. More than enough justification for coming up with her own little recipe.
Just curious how many people are mad because they think there’s too many weird glitch/granular pedals on the market and how many are just mad because of some hangup that she’s a YouTuber and not a “real” recording artist getting “signature” pedals?
Her entire thing is using pedals in a unique context and this is a really popular segment of the pedal market; it’s also right on brand for OBNE sound wise and seems like a pretty natural product development collaboration. Don’t know why this would bother anyone really, the chroma console and similar pedals are super popular and anyone making shitty low effort ambient music with this was always going to make shitty low effort ambient music with whatever they got instead.
Like I’m sure a lot of other folks here I’ve had brief infatuations with lots of pedals of this type before ultimately moving on to stuff that was a little more predictable. This one sounds pretty good for unnatural reverbs and delays that aren’t exactly like the strymon ones many others are copying and the tremolo actually sounds fantastic. I also really like chance-based delays when they’re used in good taste; the one in my Artemis was a really pleasant surprise for me. The envelope mode delay is an interesting idea, though I’m not totally convinced. The dissolve function sounds pretty nice to my ears. With the ‘smear’, excess glitchiness doesn’t usually sound very musical to me so I’m sure this one will require some restraint to work well. The blend options seem very nice. The button combo functions would probably drive me crazy since I don’t think I’d use it nearly every day and would quickly forget them during the weeks or months between uses.
It sounds good to me and for a stereo pedal of this type it’s not priced outrageously; can’t say I’ll buy this for sure but I am expecting that it will get used very well by the ambient tape loop crowd and it really does seem like a thoughtfully designed pedal that exposes a lot of musical options.
I use these sorts of pedals building soundscapes for intros/interludes much more often than I do making fully ambient compositions but they’re certainly useful; you just only need one in a mix because the whole point is that it’s an omnipresent sort of sound. I like them better for getting droning textures from stringed instruments that decay a lot, they aren’t as necessary for synths when you have ADSRs and lots of tools to draw out the drone in an interesting way.
Great points.
My best use of my Mood Mk2 was when I used the clock to really distort some microloops, then just took those snips and used them for intro/outros to the source song.
I’ve seen a few different new pedal releases that said “ambient machine” etc. and I think that drove my negative response to this. The Parting is probably really cool.
Emily straight up bugs me - just like every other gear influencer whose face is plastered on the front of the video, I know they probably need to do it for algorithms or some other arcane reason, but whenever the thumbnail is some person mugging and holding up gear, I just get turned off.
I try to be unbiased about it when it comes to the gear they promote.
