Gamechanger Audio has continued to live up to its name with the Motor Pedal, a fully playable electro-mechanical synth voice that is driven by your guitar playing.
It comes armed with an accelerator-style pedal linked to the synth's musical motor oscillator, designed to “transform brushless DC motors into living, breathing sound sources.” In essence, this is a weird blend of a synth pedal, a fuzz pedal, and an octaver.
The pedal is the heir apparent to its Motor Synth MKI and MKII – which were dubbed the world’s first polyphonic synthesizers, using electric motors as a way of controlling their oscillations – and its pitch-tracking stompbox, the Auto, which packed plenty of mad science into its housing. This marries the two with pretty gnarly results.
The end product is “a powerful, unpredictable, and endlessly fun performance tool”, with a proprietary monophonic pitch-tracking engine that follows guitars with “surgical accuracy”.
Dial-wise, Motor controls the volume of the effect of the motor, Drive dials in analog overdrive, and Tone is self-explanatory. On the other side, Vibrato/Glide shapes the movement of the motor, the Mod knob is tailored to each engine, adding an extra layer of character, and Engine dictates which engine mode is active.
There are also dials for Release and Clean, which dials in how much clean signal comes out the other end.
These controls flank five Engine Modes, which have plenty to say for themselves.
Motor mode delivers the raw output of the motor, which spikes as the signal as it spins. The speed at which the motor revs is based on the notes played, with higher notes equalling faster rotations. It can go fast enough to track the 24th fret of a high e string, and a Shift dial can push that note further upwards by a fourth, fifth, or a full octave. It can also pitch downwards.
MXD adds sharp digital waveforms to the instrument signal for aggressive sounds. This produces a cross-modulation of the motor with a digital waveform, producing very metallic sounds.
M-Wave Mode is a fully-digital wave generator which is pitch- and phase-synced to the pedal's motor. It's said to have an “imperfect mechanical soul.”
Moving on, Coil Mode uses the motor's coils as resonators, which, with the Clean backed off, sounds like Jack White writing hold music. In a good way.
Finally, Vocoder Mode acts as a multi-band filter that is highly responsive to the tone of the instrument signal. The motor's output acts as the carrier, and the instrumental signal the modulator.
Across the five mods and the characterful dials, there are plenty of mad sounds to be extracted from this thing. You could get lost for hours.
The compact design has pedalboard space in mind, and its motor block is replaceable, should the worst happen. There’s also a MIDI input for integrating into live rigs.
The Gamechanger Audio Motor Pedal is available now for £299 (approx $400).
Visit Gamechanger Audio for more.
For other crazy GA builds, check out its Bigsby pedal, built in collaboration with Fender, and its Plasma Coil fuzz/distortion, dreamed up with Jack White’s Third Man Hardware.
