Mr Black Pedals has launched the Double Tracker Stereo, a limited edition stompbox that applies some studio trickery to your electric guitar tone to give make add “fullness, vitality, and character” – and it will work a treat for bass guitar, electronic keyboards and even vocals as well.
If you’ve been keeping abreast of the Portland, Oregon guitar effects pedal company’s output over the years you might be aware that it has had a double tracker in the lineup. But the people wanted stereo.
Mr Black listened, or rather Mr Jack Deville listened, and came up with this to give the people what they want – for a limited time only.
The Double Tracker Stereo is what it says it is; it double tracks your input signal, and does so across the stereo spread. The idea and the practice of double tracking is not new. They were double tracking in ’50s, taking one track and layering it over the top of another, sometimes the same take, sometimes a slightly different take, all to deepen and widen the sound, making one guitar sound bigger.
What the Double Tracker does is perform this studio trick in real-time, via a pedal. The Double Tracker Stereo takes the signal and applies a delay between 3ms and178ms to double it, with a pair of discrete signals for the left and right stereo channels.
Simply turn the Spread dial clockwise to increase the size of the signal. The Wet/Dry mix controls how much of the doubled signal is in there with your input signal, while the Detune knob allows you to shift the pitch of the doubled signal up or down a quarter-tone.
“This smart approach instantly brings fullness, vitality, and character to your passage or song,” says Mr Black. “It’s almost like chorus, almost like slap-back, and yet at the same time: it’s neither of those effects, nor a combination of them.”
No, it is double tracking, and not something that we often consider a guitar effect and yet something we often see in guitar plugins, with the likes of Neural DSP’s Archetype series featuring doublers to apply similar effects.
The Double Tracker Stereo can be operated in two modes, Sync and Comp. Sync runs both doubled signals in tune with one another, so they match up pitch-wise. When in Comp mode, when you adjust the pitch, the left/right doubled signals move in equal and opposite directions, taking advantage of the Hass Effect to really widen that stereo field.
Very clever, and Mr Black says it can sound huge: “The sound can best be described as: Ampitheatric. Almost like an instant arena.” You can also save a preset to the pedal and if you hook it up with an expression pedal it can be used to control any parameter.
Sadly, there are only 59 of these, and half have been sold already. Act fast if you want to add some studio trickery to your pedalboard. It might just be the secret weapon you’ve been waiting for, and one that is especially valuable to players who are the sole guitarist in a band.
For more details, head over to Mr Black Pedals. Priced $249, the Double Tracker Stereo is available now.
