When JHS Pedals launched its $99 3 Series in 2020, it was with the intention of stripping down guitar effects pedal design to its essentials, offering top-quality sounds on simple stompbox with just three knobs and maybe a toggle for an alternative mode.
The 3 Series pedals were the essentials, stompboxes for beginners, for anyone on a budget. “A collection of pedals designed to give you affordability and simplicity without compromising quality,” said JHS.
But having covered the ubiquitous overdrive pedal, compressor pedal, reverb and delay pedals, too, the Kansas-based effects company has been gradually adding more exotic fare. Octave reverb, oil can delay, harmonic tremolo, a modded Tube Screamer-style drive pedal…
Where would JHS Pedals take it next? Well, we have the answer to that, with three pedals that cater to players whose tone tastes run to the exotic.
The 3 Series Bit Crusher, Ring Modulator and Glitch Delay are quite the trio. Launched yesterday, they are both a sign of the range’s success, but also, perhaps, that these sounds – hitherto exotic, forever a little weird to the ear – are becoming mainstream. What’s beyond doubt is that these offer us three very different ways of making our electric guitars sound very different.
Take the Bit Crusher. This crushes your bits. It has knobs for doing three different things: reducing the bit depth of your guitar’s signal, reducing its sample rate, and then applying a filter to the results. Adjust the bit depth via the Crush dial.
Fully counterclockwise it presents your signal as is, in 24-bit resolution, but as you turn the dial it goes from pristine to “grainy” and adding texture along the way, towards a “square-wave aggression and gated digital distortion” when dimed. The Sample Rate dial works the other way.
Fully clockwise it gives you a clean 32.768kHz, but dial it back and the signal digitally degrades, yielding some strange sounds along the way, digital artefacts, harmonic overtones, and promising “metallic, ring-mod-like chaos and full digital collapse” by its travel’s end.
The filter can warp this sound further, and there is a toggle switch for changing the filter mode. One is inspired by a vintage Oberheim synthesizer (JHS Pedals recommends this for bass guitar especially), the other is a high-pass and low-pass filter that “evokes the small speaker sound of a handheld game console”.
Is this what some 21st-century players might call an always-on tone sweetener? Could be… Could be indeed.
The Glitch Delay does what the name suggests. You can run it as a regular delay pedal with the Glitch knob fully counterclockwise. But where would be the fun in that. Turn the dial and you get time-based glitching inspired by Line 6’s pedalboard delay classic, the DL-4, and jazz guitar maverick Bill Frisell.
The glitch function plays around with the repeats, at random, bending them, making them warp. Because the glitches arrive are random, think of the Glitch knob as a probability of error knob, with probability increasing to 50 per cent with the dial maxed out. You get generous delay times with this, too, from super-tight 20ms slapback to a looooooong 980ms.
There is a toggle switch for Mix (one setting at 30 per cent, the other at 80), and if all this sounds intimidating then, rest assured, it’s not in practice. “This is an easy to use pedal where no setting sounds bad,” promises JHS.
Finally, we’ve got the 3 Series Ring Modulator, a pedal that offers you two distinct flavours of the effect that helped the Daleks talk in Doctor Who. One is inspired by the Way Huge Ringworm, the other by the Dan Electro Green Ringer, which gives you that octave-up weirdness that has a distinct Jimi Hendrix vibe.
A Tweak knob lets to add an LFO and octave-blend to these modes respectively, while Blend controls your wet/dry mix and Frequency controls the speed of the oscillator.
These 3 Series pedals are available now. See JHS Pedals for more details.
