The first setting we're going to look at is the Swell setting on the reverb. While in the setting the Mix knob adjusts the length of the swell with longer waves happening as you turn up. This works really beautifully when paired with another effect either before or after to create abstract shapes. When using a pitch effect, perhaps like the Rainbow Machine, in front of it with a large reverb, lots of delay, and a long swell, you can get exceptional pad tones. While these pedals may have started with a guitar or instrument in mind, this particular setting and signal flow can create some very interesting sounds when used with samples and by bombarding the input with audio. The Avalanche Run, then, never has a true chance to completely close but will try, creating interesting amplitude fluctuations. What personally impressed me the most is the stability of the audio while bombarding it with streams of sound—everything it created sounded musical: the beauty of the delay and reverb combination.

We're going to skip over the Normal setting, which offers more traditional delay performance, but suffice to say: it sounds great. Instead, let's take a peek at the Reverse setting. This only applies to the delay section of the pedal leaving the reverb intact and is exceptionally helpful for eerie sounds. Using voice samples, especially when pitched down, is a fairly common tactic for generating uneasy feelings; reversed voices have a similar effect. By feeding the Avalanche Run voice samples and using the two independent Mix knobs, you can play with the amount of forward or reversed voice and get interesting layers of strange sounds. If you're using stereo samples and a sampler, try sending the left and right channels to different filters and modulate the cutoff for satisfying spatial effects. You can get weirder by using the expression pedal input to modulate the delay mix for swimming sounds, or the Reverb Decay time for strange time warps. Earthqaker's EXP input can also accept voltages up to about 3.3v, you just have to use a TRS - 2x TS splitter with the Ring going into the input of a VCA and the Tip going from the output.

Of course, a discussion about Earthquaker's greatest sonic achievements wouldn't be complete without a close look at the Rainbow Machine—a pitch shifting delay infused with all sorts of peculiar magic and mystery. This is an advanced pedal that can easily become quite effervescent, but it sparkles even brighter when dialed in tastefully and with finesse. We're first going to focus simply on one of the most evergreen uses for the Rainbow Machine—and that is as a chorus pedal. Taken directly from their website, you pretty much plop everything at noon with the Magic disengaged and you have a very nice chorus: adjust the Pitch very little in either direction to effectively adjust the depth—as it would be called on a traditional chorus pedal. This serves as a great place to start exploring and I would suggest turning the Pitch knob a small amount in either direction—then adjust the Primary, Secondary, and Tracking to taste. With the Tracking knob, you can actually get a warped delay sound and the Secondary knob dials in a second shifted pitch opposite the direction of the pitch knob...great for adding extra thickness and swirling detuning to this chorus effect.

Using quick sounds, either percussive hits or bubbly, fast envelopes, yields satisfying results; by giving the Rainbow Machine less audio to smear you gain more control and the effects feels more like a small dusting. Coupling this with a nice delay, reverb, or both gives you a fantastic pad sound. Throw this in front of the Avalanche Run in its Swell setting and you can get really exceptional dimensional teleportation. In this setup, the Magic control can be used quite musically by riding the knob and artfully dis/engaging the footswitch. Using this technique requires a fair amount of concentration and a hands-on approach, but the rewards are worth the dedication, like any instrument worth pursuing. After you've grown comfortable with the quirks of this pedal, try putting a slow evolving drone through the Rainbow Machine and use this same technique, this time riding the Magic, Tracking, and the Magic footswitch. For extra weirdness, patch a random source into the EXP input (check out this article for advice on how best to make this connection)—Pam's Pro Workout and Tangle Quartet work great to dial in the right amount of modulation for the Rainbow Machine...and Avalanche Run, for that matter.

Afterneath provides typical dedicated controls for reverb tail, dampening, mix, and the most important and individual control, Drag. The Length control is influenced by the other settings, but by itself it creates a splash of resonant delays that are bright and fluttery—the further you increase it, the longer they ring out. On its own, Length doesn't actually create a feedback loop or self oscillate, but with the introduction of Reflect, Diffuse, or Dampen, you start to hear even longer, more drawn-out sounds. I find the easiest way to get lengthy and softer tails is to introduce Dampen with a high Length setting; this creates lovely, muted feedback loops that drone on for forever. Dampen allows you to hold onto lower information longer, but it also raises the noise floor the more sound it is fed. I find this nice for texturizing pads and rumbles, adding a sweet touch of hiss to darker sounds.

The Reflect control acts somewhat like a typical early reflection parameter, but like the other controls, it is also dependent on the Drag control. Introducing Reflect not only adds extra clusters of reflections at the front of the delay tail, but also some towards the end, pushing Afterneath into feedback at a much earlier stage on the Length control. The feedback created with Reflect is a bit harsher, brighter, and can cause self-oscillation in conjunction with the Length control—make sure to watch your ears! Diffuse, on the other hand, is a gentler control, acting like the diffusion parameter on typical algorithmic reverbs. Smoothing out the separation of delays and making a more consistent spray of tone, Diffuse gives you all the lushness you're looking for in reverbs while maintaining Afterneath's the dark, ethereal nature.

The final control we need to touch upon is the one you'll be reaching for the most and truly makes Afterneath unique and quite playable as a reverb: Drag. Much like the name implies, Drag pulls your reverb downward into an abyss of swirly, lo-fi bedding you could sleep on. Drag pitches down and slightly lowers the quality of the affected audio, and when you introduce new sound, the lower the Drag setting, the more spaced out and pre-delayed the delays are. Afterneath v3 adds Expression/CV control over Drag, as well as multiple Drag modes with distinct variations of slew and quantization, making Afterneath an even more playable pedal. Sweeping Drag with an Expression pedal or sending sequences to a chromatically quantized Drag mode makes it easy to turn Afterneath into a performance instrument, or even explore the smoother modes by adding slight warbles or complex shapes to turn Afterneath into a more versatile sound design tool.

Afterneath is not a pedal you'll want to just set and forget—it begs the user to explore all it has to offer in any setting. Sending drums through Afterneath at shorter settings while modulating the Drag control can make for wonkier rhythms and breathing drum grooves. Playing a synth pluck with high Length and Diffuse and low Drag settings creates floating, ringy pads that fade into the distance. Choose a quantized mode like octave and fifth or a major scale to create recycled melodic and harmonic ideas. No matter what's in your studio, Afterneath can easily add depth, weird reflections, and a tinge of pleasantly murky dread. And don't forget—Earthquaker also released Afterneath in Eurorack format, bringing its patent depth and weirdness to an even more bizarre context.

Sea Machine has two primary sections. The bottom controls showcase both Rate and Depth parameters, controlling the modulation of delay time, even offering a variable modulation waveshape that morphs between a smooth triangle and an edgy square. This means that effects can range from subtle doubling to drunken wavers and extreme jumps in delay time—this is great for guitars, but as a synth programmer/sound designer, I like using this with softer waveforms or filtered sounds to get a sense of space and motion.

Where Sea Machine strays from your average chorus pedal lies in the Animate and Dimension controls, changing the range of pitch modulation and adding feedback to the delay, respectively. Animate introduces pitch variance by acting like a bias knob—the further clockwise it goes, the farther the pitch swings, up to roughly a perfect fourth. I love incorporating max Animate, max Depth, and fully square Shape to give off that chiptune-esque feel (you can find this patch in the manual), but adding gestures like minimizing and maximizing the depth can even further accentuate the effect on pitch. Dimension, on the other hand, adds feedback to your delay line, creating dark and textured echoes the more you turn it up. One of my favorite and unusual use cases is to process hi hats and transient material through Sea Machine while performing with the Dimension parameter. This creates moody echoes and light tails that extend the sound and add some length and breath.

I wanted to talk about the Arpanoid at the last minute because I'd almost forgotten how much fun I had with it when I originally bought it in mid 2018—Lisa Bella Donna hammed it up at Moogfest and I couldn't resist purchasing one. Getting to write this has rekindled my love for it, and even though it seems to be made for live/non-programmable instruments, I think Arpanoid is also wonderful for adding flare, harmonic interest, and tasty textures to your sound design. Arpanoid is a polyphonic pitch arpeggiator that doesn't simply delay and pitch shift, but rather intelligently copies the original signal and applies a designable arpeggio that shifts the audio in real time. Initially, I really loved throwing Arpanoid on simple melodies, basses, and pads, but as we delve deeper, you'll see we can really stretch Arpanoid to fit a multitude of use cases.

Taking a look at the pedal, we have several controls for making a variety of arpeggiated figures. At the center, we see a Mode selector knob that switches through eight different modes and is divided into two categories: major and minor. The first four major modes span an octave down to original pitch, original pitch to an octave up, an octave down to an octave up, and random pitches within an octave down to an octave up—the next four are the same order, but just in minor. Although Arpanoid limits pitch scaling to ionian (major) and aeolian (minor) modes, they're the most commonly used in western popular genres and are fantastic to implement in polytonal setups, basing the ratios between your scale—lydian, phrygian, harmonic minor, or whatever have you—and the Arpanoid's Mode. I found that throwing fourths and fifths through Arpanoid is an easy way to get started, but adding in half steps here and there or even a third resulted in colors I was eager to explore.

However, Night Wire has some other tricks up its sleeve, thanks to the various modes offered by its Rate and Frequency toggle switches. Notably, they both feature Attack modes—these are internal envelope followers which can affect either the tremolo rate, the frequency of the filters, or both simultaneously. This affords dynamic control over both how fast the tremolo effect is as well as the center frequency of the filters, meaning that as you really dig into your guitar or pump in slamming beats from a drum machine, dizzying spectral movement is easily achieved. Furthermore, setting the Depth control at its minimum will effectively bypass the internal LFO's amplitude modulation level, turning Night Wire into more of a phaser or weird filter effect.

Heavily inspired by the spooky textures that can be created with spring reverbs, Ghost Echo is a digital reverb inspired by the quirky spring tanks found in guitar amps. While they're an affordable way to achieve reverb, springs are inherently unrealistic in terms of how they behave compared to a real space, both in terms of how reflections are produced as well as the tonal characteristics of the springs themselves, but they have a character and charm of their own that has become an important part of the electric guitar's sonic vocabulary.

But, a digital architecture has its advantages, and the Ghost Echo compiles helpful parameters into three macro-level controls. Dwell is a combination of decay and feedback controls, capable of self-oscillation. Attack is somewhat like pre-delay, which isn't exactly possible on a true spring reverb without using a delay pedal beforehand, but also affects the pitches of sustained self-oscillating textures. Depth isn't a dry/wet control, but rather it adds the wet signal in with the dry, and begins boosting the reverb signal after the halfway point.

Patching synthesizers through the Night Wire and then into the Ghost Echo is an excellent combination for adding rich movement to pads. Even FM synthesizers like the Digitone can gain a warmth to their sounds in a way that's closer to analog instruments, which says a lot about the power of applying effects to synths. Subtle pulses of tremolo into lengthy reverb tails are an instant ticket to ambient bliss, meaning this pedal combo is an easy way to lose yourself in lush tones for hours.

Be warned: Data Corrupter is not for the faint of heart. It certainly can be wrangled into behaving predictably...but when you first get it on your pedalboard, you'll likely find that it produces a crushing cacophony of clicks, screams, and square wave dive bombs. So...what is it? Well, Data Corrupter is a PLL (phase-locked loop) pedal—a particularly crude device that attempts to track the pitch of incoming signals to control internal oscillators, creating the rough effect of a "guitar synth."

Functionally, Data Corrupter is divided into four primary blocks: a Voice Mixer, Master Oscillator, Subharmonic Oscillator, and Frequency Modulator. The Voice Mixer contains three controls, which allow you to adjust the proportional balance of three sound sources. The first sound source is labeled "Square"—this is a hard square wave fuzz derived directly from your input signal. The other level controls correspond do the Master Oscillator and the Subharmonic Oscillator.

Spatial Delivery features three distinct modes, with three parameters each. Two controls have a consistent function from mode to mode: Resonance and Filter. The Resonance control adjusts the filter's resonant peak, with subtle response when CCW and much more liquid, whistling tones with the resonance control turned up. The Filter knob is a continuous control for the filter type, with highpass response fully CCW, bandpass in the center, and lowpass fully CW. This is already a notable feature well beyond the capabilities of most envelope filter pedals—rather than focusing in on lowpass/bandpass quacks/sweeps and wah-like sounds, it allows you access to airy highpasses, blended filter type zaps, and all sorts of novel new sounds.

From there, each mode differs a bit from one another. The first two modes are pretty easy to wrap your head around—Up Sweep and Down Sweep. These are dynamic wah/filter-style effects that cause the filter's cutoff frequency to change in tandem with the dynamics of the incoming sound. In Up Sweep mode, you get classic envelope filter response, in which your playing dynamics cause the filter's cutoff frequency to increase. With lowpass or bandpass sounds, this can give you classic funk and jam band tones; with a highpass response, though, this has the fascinating effect of note attacks being relatively thin, with the sound opening up or "blooming" as your notes decay. Down Sweep has the opposite effect, with your playing dynamics causing the filter's cutoff frequency to lower. This is great for synth-like zaps when using lowpass or bandpass responses, or for creating notes with hard attacks that thin out and fizzle as they decay when using a highpass response. In both Up and Down Sweep modes, the Range control affects the envelope sensitivity—how quickly and how intensely the filter tracks your playing. My first impulse with this pedal was to dial in more extreme zaps and sweeps by cranking the Range control...but in actuality, you can dial in a load of subtlety here, creating synth bass-like muted tones, long-form filter sweeps that build with your playing, or whistling ambiences that sound ever-so-slightly unstable.