Name: What is it?
The Walrus Audio Canvas Rehearsal is a new addition to the Canvas line of utility pedals. Unlike other units aimed at live use, the Rehearsal is a practice tool.
It's designed to be placed at the end of a pedalboard and function as a combination headphone amp and auxiliary audio source input. This means you can play along to a backing track, or a simple metronome to practice while incorporating the rest of your rig.
Specs
- Launch price: $249/£249/€289
- Type: Practice tool and metronome
- Controls: Headphone volume, Multi-function encoder, Guitar volume, Click volume, Aux volume, Tap button, Start/stop Tap Footswitch
- Features: Headphone amp, Guitar/pedalboard input, Aux input and Bluetooth for backing tracks/aux audio source, Metronome
- Connectivity: Stereo In/Out, MIDI In/Thru, Headphone, Aux, USB-C and Bluetooth
- Bypass: N/A
- Power: 9V DC Centre-negative, 300mA
- Dimensions: 65x42x124 mm mm
- Weight: 340g
- Options: N/A
- Contact: Walrus Audio
Build quality
Build quality rating: ★★★★★
Like the other units in the Canvas range, the Rehearsal sports an understated colourway and tasteful matte black finish. The small OLED screen is bright enough to read clearly at head height, and the build quality is excellent. The ping-pong idle animation is pretty cool too.
There are jacks on the top side that might easily admit a spilled beer, but that isn't the issue it might otherwise be. After all, even if the pedal would stand up to gigging, it is billed as a rehearsal tool (the clue is in the name).
Usability
Usability rating: ★★★★★
Its strength is as an all-in-one solution.
Many pedals like all-in-one multi-fx units offer similar functionality, but the Rehearsal is aimed at a different audience. Its target is guitarists with a pedalboard made up of standalone pedals, looking for a simple headphone solution to stick at the end of their chain.
The Rehearsal is compact, does its one job well, and is easy to navigate without needing instructions. Like most Bluetooth devices, there's a little bit of faff with pairing, but the friction comes from the Bluetooth dance, not the pedal.
There's an additional use case the Canvas Rehearsal supports which isn't immediately obvious: that it's a Bluetooth audio source. It's unlikely to be something you use live, unless you have some kind of phone app from which you want to route the audio into your pedals.
However, in a practice space, there are lots of situations when it might be useful to be able to quickly play out an audio file through your amp. Let's say you're the main songwriter in your band. You write a guitar part, play the demo version to a click, and record it in a DAW.
You can now bounce that stem, save it to your phone and use the Rehearsal to play it out of your full rig to let your bandmates work out parts… or to shoot the idea down. Either way, it could be a serious time-saver, especially for technical passages and ideas that are hard to play over and over.
Sounds
Sounds rating: ★★★★☆
Obviously this is a DI and headphone amp, not an amp sim, so the sound quality is that of running directly into a PA system or a mixer, rather than an amp. With that in mind, if you have any amp/speaker simulation at your disposal, it's worth engaging it for more realism.
It can be used as a compact mixer, with a pedalboard guitar amp solution after it, but this is an expensive solution for a small mixer. Its strength is as an all-in-one solution.
That said, as far as these things go it's clean, with enough headroom to avoid clipping. There was an early bug with stereo output to headphones, but that has been fixed via firmware update.
While playing guitar without a backing track can be a little stark, using it to play along to a track takes a lot of the edge off the fact you're not running through a real amp. The volume of the guitar has to be pretty high versus the track before it takes any of the sheen off your enjoyment.
Verdict
The Walrus Rehearsal is not the most exciting pedal, but it's the kind of device that some players will have been dying for.
Whether you're practicing in a room next door to a sleeping child, locking down licks for a new song in a hotel room on tour, or auditioning a long list of riffs in the practice space via Bluetooth, it's a versatile unit that does its one thing very, very well.
MusicRadar verdict: As an all-in-one silent rehearsal solution, the Canvas Rehearsal does exactly what it says on the tin. It's easy to set up, intuitive to use and the addition of Bluetooth is a huge value add in terms of functionality and use-cases.
