Is This The COOLEST Effects Pedal EVER??!!

[Music] i have a problem with the word cool to strive to do cool things to make cool things is something many of us all kind of aim for but to strive to be cool to try and be cool is inherently uncool now don't mistake people who dress fashionably as cool that's just trendy and trendy i guess is copying a good example of trying hard to be cool would be this car it's very fast it's very expensive but it's just trying so hard whereas this one it's just cool it's not just the way things look their form factor it's what they do this watch for example looks cool but also works on the moon whereas this lemon squeezer looks cool but can't squeeze lemons for the definition of cool for me is to calmly and confidently do something that most people will find either annoying absurd or obvious my wife's definition of cool is cooler than my definition of cool is the ability to discern something that will transcend the era so this is a building and by golly is it trying hard it's the only building i've ever seen with its own sweat stains whereas this building i believe in future generations will be venerated as highly as saint paul's cathedral but it's not just the way things look or behave i have met many genuinely very cool people and whilst their public persona may be that of cool it's not how they do things and who they are it's what they do and this brings me on to equipment there is very much cool equipment cool synth not so cool synth but the thing that makes equipment cool for me is firmly in line with my definition the ability to calmly and confidently do something that most other people would find stupid annoying or just obvious now i've been working with a lot of guitar pedals of late i suspect as a keyboard player inherently uncool using equipment that is designed for guitarists cool is my vain effort to become to strive to be cool but i found this effects pedal that very much fits in line with the concept of calmly and confidently doing something just that little bit silly that well certainly makes my music my cheesy chords sound cool let's go and take a look and today's equipment has a distinctly canadian feel what neil young kd lang captain kirk neo maybe not neo what i'm trying to say is canada can be cool too a lot of you have been asking how i'm getting the signal into my pedals it's a simple effects loop that i've got running out of logic into an auxiliary channel but what i do use when i'm using pedals that don't have a line input switch like the strymon had in the last review that i did is i use this reamp unit by radial from canada basically what this does is de-amplify and then re-amplify i believe that guitar pedals have a lower impedance so basically it needs to take the edge off and then put the edge back without just adding in loads of noise and stuff like that i sound like i know what i'm talking about i really don't but certainly the signal that i'm getting through this using this is great so we've got our line inputs balanced either via jack or xlr in the back and then basically we've got a send so this is amount of signal that goes to your device or devices and then receive so the amount that we send back to the computer we've got a phase inversion and it actually can mix between dry and wet and as i mentioned it had two effects loops which can be simply muted here so what are we looking at today we're looking at the fairfield circuitry shallow water this isn't a new pedal i think it's been out for at least four years but i thought i'd just take a look at it with us composers in mind not just putting guitars through it but some other stuff keyboards pads strings drums and i like so at first look it's a sturdy somewhat knowingly industrial chic design and if you play with it long enough it does smell like you've been jangling your change all day it doesn't take batteries so i'm powering it off this uh strymon zoomer uh which has this standard kind of pedal input now you can get in and adjust a couple of bits and bobs there is a line switcher inside so if you're predominantly synths and just want to use it on a kind of a line level uh effects loops you can switch that i'm going to keep it as a guitar level because this is going to be incorporated into a bigger array which won't be line level and there's also a dip switch that stops this unit from boosting but what is this unit well if you go on the website well i would understand it if they wrote it in serbo croat even a language anymore de servians and croatians still call it servo it sounds a bit shares-y doesn't it it sounds like a difficult language to speak so i think i would have understood what this pedal did more had they written it in hungarian at first glance if i was to describe it to friends it's basically it's a wow and flutter pedal it does all the yummy stuff that cassettes do without all of the annoying cassette hits and i thought for nearly 300 quid that's a heck of a lot to pay for something we've been trying to eradicate from cassettes for decades i've seen a lot of reviewers call this a subtle device and i would actually call it a sensitive one and actually by playing with it more and more i realize that its possibilities are much greater than simply a wow and flutter machine so basically it messes with time and speed and so in order to do that it actually has a microprocessor inside it so this is a canadian hybrid digital device and i'm still maintaining it's the coolest effects pedal ever how do i know so it's got blue light but more than that let's have a listen to the piano going through it so just the plane signal that's going to the reamp so just straight in and out no effects loop let's switch the shallow water in in bypass so absolutely no coloration to the sound now let's concentrate on this side of the box first we've got our volume our mix which i've got up to 100 and we've got a low pass filter let's switch it in so the first thing you'll hear is that it immediately boosts the signal this is the thing that you can switch off within the box but i love the kind of distorting capabilities of this unit low pass filter [Music] and we can mix between the boosted signal now i wouldn't quite call this a parallel signal because you will hear it kind of fat flanging phase i guess it is kind of going through a timing device so there's going to be a delay of a few milliseconds in there i imagine so here's the kind of wow and flutter section of the device we've got our rate and our depth so let's turn that up a little bit faster [Laughter] so it's it's almost like a random oscillator let's turn it right up so somewhat interesting then there's a kind of a low subby sound that's introduced there now the damp knob kind of dampens the impact of the depth of the wave so it softens and bevels the corners so it almost becomes imperceptible so you're probably thinking is that it for 300 quid well i think it's very interesting uh a lot of you mentioned in my last strymon review that i should have put some other instruments through and i think you were absolutely right because it actually taught me a lot more about the possibilities of this unit so let's stick some drums through there i'm going to take our tape wow and flutter down and just take us back to where we were [Music] bypassed and then [Music] volume [Music] so quite an extraordinary very kind of believable distortion there let's have a go at the drums with all of the wow and flutter [Music] now what's interesting about this is if i just take down all of these time effects and actually just put the mix up you'll hear how there is definitely a slight delay between the two signals which creates a kind of flangey chorusy effect [Music] and by messing with these time parameters we're going to accentuate that chorus effect along with the kind of the pitchy interest [Music] and i guess if i reduce the depth [Music] we're left with kind of a very interesting phasey flangey chorusy thing without the strange pitchy effects let's have a look at a guitar [Music] here that's more of a standard kind of chorus sound mix all the way [Music] so for something that struck me at first when i got out of the box is incredibly niche and a bit of a one-trick pony i think you'll agree that we're already creating some quite interesting different sounds just by using a combination of these interesting oddly asymmetrical oscillations with a combination of the mix and volume to increase the amount of kind of clipping and distortion for you synth heads let's have a listen to how that sounds as well let's turn the mix up to full and i think first let's mess around with all of these interesting timing effects before we turn the mix down to create that chorusing really interesting stuff what i like about the slightly broken nature of the sounds it creates is it gives cheesy chords a a genuine kind of aching emotional feeling to them slightly broken slightly like a synth pad that's sweeping slightly and let's listen to some juicy flour tandos so let's listen to the raw signal [Music] so a lot of you would be thinking well very very mono sounding how would you work with that in say a film score situation where you're predominantly in stereo or 5.1 well a big cop-out for a lot of pedals is to then put this into a delay pedal and then into a reverb but i think that would take away from all of these really interesting broken elements so i thought what i do is basically do two passes of the piano signal and not to create like a proxy stereo but a true stereo so first send it the left signal and record it then send it send it the right signal and record it so just going to get a sound i like [Music] right okay so same settings on the shallow water but because the oscillation is chaotic and it's not clocked to anything it will create an effect similar to two tape machines uh running independently of each other when actually synchronized on the computer as i mentioned before it's not a pseudo-stereoscopic effect it's a true one because it's now receiving the right hand of the piano signal [Music] it's just beautiful [Music] for me the ability to break a very perfect sounding sample is just [Music] in a way that makes it more heartbreaking these cheesy chords is absolutely gorgeous and the stereo effect is something i really like [Music] i hope you agree that it's it's a very musical effect and i there are so many boxes that i open that just don't really react musically to my music and what what i love about this is it's complimentary so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to look at this experiment of the left and the right and record the drums the guitar the pad and the strings [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so is this the coolest effects pedal ever well if there was one reservation it would be its form factor it's uh knowingly trying to be industrial shabby chic which for me is akin to those distressed jeans that middle-aged men buy from gab but it does have a blue light and blue lights are cool i guess we should maybe refer to my wife's definition of cool will it transcend the era will it last well only time will tell as an investment it is expensive and for me investments are all about returns and i'll report back whether or not i've had a return on that investment in what it gives back to me and to my music my output the sounds that i create thanks as always for watching remember friday live on this channel time below for some behind the scenes scoops and then a live tom bowler with an ama so it'd be just great to see you there 30th of november is the closing date for your entries to winter voices and that opportunity of winning one of those five insane prizes so check on the links down below thanks as always for watching to the end do subscribe if you haven't done already ding that bell to be notified the next time i put up a film and one of those always much appreciated see you next time great i thought that was okay

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 52,318

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: cUngaAomGdQ

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020