Latvia’s Gamechanger Audio continues to invent wacky, one-of-a-kind pedals, but its new Recorder is so unusual the company still isn’t sure what exactly the pedal is – or could be.
Like the weird cousin to a loop pedal, the Recorder is designed to “turn any recorded phrase into a living, breathing, unique audio effect,” by reshaping (read: bastardizing) a phrase in unique ways as it loops.
It accommodates a recorded phrase up to 12 seconds in length, be that a riff, melody, screech of feedback, or whatever else takes your fancy, with a glut of controls able to reimagine the phrase.
The recorded phrases behave differently depending on their lengths, while three color-coded layers offer three different worlds of weirdness. Phrases between 50–200 ms “behave like spectral filters, resonators, or timbral imprints,” while longer phrases “become living rhythmic maps, vowel vocoders, and phantom riffs that live inside your clean sound.”
Red mode allows the Tone, Pitch (with an eight octave range), Damage (which offers digital degradation if turned left, and shreds the phrase into “aggressive harmonic-chaos” if turned right), and Stetch (speed) to be manipulated.
Yellow turns its quartet of controls into Slice (for overlapping “spectral” repeats), Repeats, Resonance, and Distance dials for time-based modulation. Lastly, White mode affects Amplitude (for adding or subtracting the most active frequencies), Attack, Timbre (ranging between vocoder and cleaner resynthesis), and Decay.
There’s pretty detailed and bonkers science behind it all, meaning it's not exactly a stompbox that will be instantly welcoming and easy to understand, but that also means there’s a whole universe of sounds to be found lurking beneath its all black casing.
Unfortunately, there’s no supporting video evidence of this pedal strutting its silly stuff (yet), but the prospect of the pedal alone is enough to whet our appetite.
“We have defined it as a spectral morphing workstation,” says GA, “but honestly, even we don’t fully know what the Recorder is yet, because it is specifically designed to produce a unique audio effect in every player’s hands.”
“Yes, we’re still the plasma people, motor people, still the team that pulled reverb out of infrared reflections on a metal spring,” it adds, referring to its radical fuzz/distortion, drivable synth, and optical reverb pedals, respectively.
“That mission continues, but now, we’re venturing into a parallel universe – and we’re approaching it the only way we know how: Inventing new digital-native instruments that are unique, strange, expressive, and unpredictable. The Recorder is the very first creature to walk out of that laboratory.”
The pedal is only available until December 10, with each pedal numbered and signed. GA says there will be no reruns.
It's powered by a standard 9V plug for easy pedalboard integration, but doesn't ship with a power supply.
The Gamechanger Audio Recorder is available now for $249.
Jump over to Gamechanger Audio for more.
For more game-changing work from Gamechanger Audio, see its Bigsby footpedal, which it designed in collaboration with Fender.
Elsewhere, two former GA employees have teamed up with talent from Neural DSP, Darkglass, and Marshall for a new company, Mentha Works. Its debut pedal, the Monk Echo, has just dropped, and it's a wild ambient machine inspired by the human voice.
