The phaser is one of Red Witch Pedals founder and CEO Ben Fulton’s favourite guitar effects pedals, a big part of the reason why the New Zealand high-end stompbox brand made its debut with the Andy Summers-approved Moon Phaser, but with its latest release, the limited edition Solaria, Fulton offers a twist on the formula – and quite possibly the most versatile phaser ever made.
Bold claims but it would be a sad day indeed if a stompbox designer couldn’t make bold claims of their own pedalboard candy. Besides, Red Witch has the form – and the electric guitar tones – to back it up.
There are many ways to describe why the Solaria is different to your common or garden variety phaser, or indeed to the Moon Phaser from the Red Witch catalogue. Where the Moon Phaser was based around a FET-driven circuit, offering 6-stage phase-shifting, the Solaria is driven by OTA (“Operational Transconductance Amplifiers”), which, ceteris paribus, are more “chewy” and “jet-like”, putting more extreme degrees of swirl on the menu.
This is the first OTA phaser to come hot off the Red Witch breadboard, and it presents players with four knobs for dialling in a sound.
The first, and one we always like to see on any modulation effect, is a Mix control, allowing you to adjust the balance between your dry, unprocessed signal and the processed signal, opening up plenty of real estate for textural variance. Red Witch says it works a treat on bass guitar, and promises players that it partners nicely with overdrive pedals.
Next you have the Velocity dial, which, as the name suggests, controls the speed of the LFO, from “a slow crawl right through to an ultrafast bubbling”. So far, so conventional. But Red Witch says the Dimension and Resonance controls are where the Solaria differentiates itself, offering hitherto uncharted sounds to explore.
Resonance, like a feedback control, controls how much of the signal is send back into itself, with the more you send back in, the greater the intensity of the effect, and all the harmonically interesting swirl you would associate with a phaser.
Dimension is an all-new parameter for phasers, one that Fulton based off his ‘Trajectory’ control on the original Moon Phaser. Keep this below noon and the phaser sound feels “deep and pulse-y” but as you turn it clockwise the processed signal thins out, becoming “lighter and shimmery”, and combining both of these latter two controls is where you will find the most radically original sounds.
This is definitely not for the casual user, the player who uses the orange box on a Friday night – but just for one solo. At $349, the price invites serious phaser heads only. But these days there are a lot of these nuts about.
Each pedal is handmade using Neutrik jacks and has a footswitch mounted independently to make it more road-worthy. The Solaria comes numbered and hand-signed by Fulton, and he is only making 79 of them. For more details and to order, head over to Red Witch Pedals.
