Chase Bliss Audio has just made its first multi-effects pedal for guitar and it is a compact, dual-footswitch stompbox that serves up off-menu reverbs, delays, modulation, pitch effects, synth effects and lo-fi textures – and you can blend them together.
There’s always a wayfaring spirit to these Chase Bliss designs. You start turning knobs and who knows where your electric guitar tone will end up. It helps that there are four onboard preset slots, 122 available via MIDI.
Chase Bliss describes it as “a little museum of the rare and strange for you to wander around.”
“Tour through 12 modes that can be blended in countless ways, a full spectrum of textures inspired by the effects that have captivated and perplexed us over the years,” says the company. “Want to become a phasing resonator?
Okay. How about a distant synth, or swelling octaves melting in the sun? We can do that. A bit of whatever you need, and a whole bunch you’re not expecting.”
Some of these sounds might be familiar to long-time fans of Chase Bliss. If you have ever been curious about adding the Generation Loss MKII to your pedalboard – one of the most unique guitar pedals on the market – then the Lost + Found will give you some of that flavour, with its Gen Lite mode presenting a streamlined take on the Generation Loss MKII – in other words “a bundle of imperfections that capture the character of degraded tape” that can be applied to your sound.
Many of these sounds are inspired by classic sounds but given a twist, like a tape echo that can create short loops, or how the Ensemble Expander channels ‘80s rack-mounted chorusing effects that can be spread across the stereo spread.
There is also a Sympathetic Resonator mode, offering a polyphonic pitch-tracking resonator that could be used as a bizarro alternative to reverb, or an Impulse Synthesizer that can give slow chords a cinematic strings quality, and the Spectral Modulator just sounds plain cool. What’s that? It creates a synthesized replica of your clean tone and modulates it for “sparkling, energised trails”.
Again, it’s Chase Bliss presenting a weird effect that can stand in or do the job of a common or garden variety sound.
Where the Sympathetic Resonator could be your reverb pedal’s fun, drunken uncle, the Spectral Modulator can behave like a low-pass filter. “Cartoonish phaser,” Pitch Repeater, Orchestral Swell… this looks like a wild trip, but you’ve got to be quick.
Released as part of the Small Batch Bliss series, it is built to order, available to preorder until August 31, shipping the month thereafter. Place an order within the time frame and you’re guaranteed one. Thereafter it’s gone.
See Chase Bliss Audio for details. Price is €469.
