If you're at all familiar with the world of guitar effects, you're surely aware of Electro-Harmonix: a long-standing leader in the world of audio processing. Founded by musician-turned-entrepreneur Mike Matthews in 1968—in the age of psychedelic studio techniques and fuzzed-out guitar tones—EHX was responsible for creating entirely new concepts in guitar signal processing altogether. 1968's LPB-1 Linear Power Booster purportedly was the beginning of overdriven amp tones; 1975's Electric Mistress was the first compact, self-contained flanger effect processor; 1976's Memory Man was the first commercially-available IC-based compact delay unit. From there, they've consistently made breakthroughs in pitch shifting technology, guitar synthesis, and much more.

Today, Electro-Harmonix's product lineup consists of well over a hundred distinct items...and unlike many pedal companies, EHX isn't just about overdrives and fuzz (though of course, they do have some of the most popular overdrives and fuzzes on the market). As in the past, Electro-Harmonix isn't afraid to get weird—and as such, they have a number of processors that break out of the conventional "guitar pedal" paradigm and into more esoteric, peculiar corners of sound design. And of course, to our delight, their pedals work spectacularly with basically anything you pass through them, making them an excellent tool for guitarists, synthesists, bassists, and studio musicians alike.

In this article, we're taking a closer look at ten of our favorite oddball EHX effects, proving that there's much much more to this company than the Big Muff. If you're interested in exploring creative pedals for sound design and electronic music, read on.

Brian's Picks: Superego+ & POG2

Electro-Harmonix has steadily developed their line of synth engines and signal manipulators over the past decade with pieces like the Freeze, Attack Decay, xx9 Series, the Superego, and the pedal we're going to focus on now, the Superego+. With an added Threshold, dedicated Attack and Decay knobs, as well as 11 onboard effects, it packs a ridiculous level of flexibility into a small package. You can dial in almost any modulation effect with a unique flavor, however, we're going to focus on one area where this happens to excel: textural evolution of long passages.

Iain's Picks: Mainframe & Pitch Fork+

EHX's Mainframe enhances the quality of your desired sonic palette by degrading the source you feed it through sample-rate and bit reduction. Crushing drums and aliasing synth leads, the Mainframe offers a variety of flavors with individual controls of the sample-rate, bit depth, and a dry/wet blend that sounds spectacular for dialing in the perfect amount of dirt. The provided multimode filter sounds super clean with not a lot of character, something I find desirable in managing and sculpting lofi sounds. I really enjoy using the expression/CV to modulate the sample-rate over time for slight warbles or extremely sequenced results on pads and keys.

Bitcrushing has had a huge impact on many genres of music over the past several decades, and with the rise of lofi beats and lofi house over the past few years, adding a bitcrusher to your arsenal rather than tape effects and vinyl crackle might give you an edge that most people aren't exploring in such genres.

Changing the footswitch on Pitch Fork+ to a momentary effect introduces glissando with variable rise and fall times, allowing you to inject intervals that glide into whatever melody or bass line is being performed. Implementing this technique in a nontraditional way, such as on a drum or percussion source with solid fundamentals, can supply a more slidey tonal sound and softened transients. Noisier sources freak the Pitch Fork+ out and give you these glitchy and chaotic results. Choosing an XMOD algorithm and increasing the amount can provide effects from subtle sheen to gritty chaos; I love applying this to simpler tones like filtered saws or just pure sines for gnarl without it getting away from you, and adding just moments of this can really add zest and a performance feature to a sequenced loop.

It's important to recognize the impact pitch shifters, harmonizers, and vocoders have had on the way we sound design and make music. They not only provide pleasantly unnatural ways to create harmonic progressions, but also allow the artist to multiply a sound and reach further to create variation. That said, the Pitch Fork+ is a great addition to create vertical height and depth to any sound source, be it guitars, synths, voice, or anything your heart desires.

Ryan's Picks: Deluxe Memory Boy & Mod11

Many Electro-Harmonix pedals have a long legacy behind them—there are countless variations on the Big Muff, Polyphonic Octave Generators in all shapes and sizes, as many Small Stones, Holy Grails, and Electric Mistresses as you could possibly need. And then, there's the Memory Man: a legendary delay that has spawned countless offspring, no fewer than seven of which are still in production today. I want to bring attention to one of the overlooked members of this particular family (and one of my favorite pedals altogether): the Deluxe Memory Boy.

Deluxe Memory Boy is one of the more affordable options from the Memory series, offering a similar feature set as the Deluxe Memory Man 550-TT: built-in delay time modulation, tap tempo with selectable subdivisions, extensive expression pedal control, and an effects loop for adding other effects into the delay's feedback path. That being the case...what is the difference between the two? Slight functional differences aside, one of the most profound differences has to do with the sound quality—due to the fact that each uses different BBD chips, the Memory Man sounds significantly more bright and crisp, whereas the Deluxe Memory Boy sounds crunchier, darker, murkier.

Another surprisingly affordable unsung hero of EHX's current lineup, the Mod11 provides loads of unique modulation effects in a tiny package—including a number of bizarre effects found in their other pedals. With eleven distinct modulation modes, it's a modulation-focused counterpart to the Oceans 11 Reverb, packing a ton of sonic potential into a single affordable pedal.

Another particular strong and novel mode is the Thru-Zero Flanger (TZF)—similar to conventional flanging effects, but where the delayed signal passes through the sweep's zero point to create peculiar harmonic accentuations not possible on more typical flangers. For me, one of the most interesting settings with the TZF is the barber pole setting, which allows the flanger to sound as if it is continually rising or falling rather than sweeping back and forth in a typical LFO shape. This can be a great way of adding an unsettling edge to any sonic atmosphere—and it sounds excellent for adding shape/motion/direction to complex, noisy textures.

Of course, the other modes are excellent as well—the filter mode, for instance, is another strong point, featuring lowpass, bandpass, and highpass filter types with multiple LFO shapes and an envelope filter modulation option. Each mode offers its own quirks, tricks, and hidden features...so if you're looking for a modulation effect that you can really dig into, why not get eleven for the price of one?

Jacob's Picks: 8-Step Program & Clockworks

Being one of the most recognized pedal brands of all time, it should come as no surprise to know that Electro-Harmonix has produced a lot of different designs over the years. And when considering the success of heavy hitters like the Big Muff and Memory Man, there's been plenty of room for them to experiment with releasing some more niche designs here and there.

Parallel to the rising popularity of effects pedals in the 1970s was the growing interest and availability of synthesizers, sequencers, and eventually drum machines. While companies were shrinking down from expansive modular systems to fixed-architecture synths in an effort to increase affordability and ease-of-use to customers, many of these instruments, such as the Moog Minimoog, still had external control inputs to interface with the patch points of a modular synthesizer. But for the most part, unless you happened to attend or teach at a university, work in a premier recording studio, or simply be a world-famous musician, accessing a modular to expand your keyboard synth was no easy task at the time. Sensing the market appeal of small, pedal-sized enclosures offering synthesizer control methods, Electro-Harmonix was one of the companies to step up to the plate and produce comparatively affordable alternative solutions.

Today, the EHX lineup ranges from reissues of their most iconic circuits to fresh new designs, and still hiding among them are some useful tools for clocking and sequencing synthesizers, pedals, and more. Of these, the 8 Step Program and Clockworks serve as a potent combination for expanding any synthesizer setup, without the need to additional hardware and power systems like Eurorack modules.

Where the 8 Step Program handles continuous voltage sequences, Clockworks accommodates flexible clocking to keep everything running in tight sync. Unlike its counterpart, Clockworks is functionally unchanged from the version produced in 1980. It offers four channels, each with a division control to divide the internal or external clock source by up to eight. Connecting each channel to its own 8 Step Program, drum machine, or sequencer and then playing around with the division count will immediately create polyrhythms across your electronic ensemble.

One really cool situation we can imagine with the Clockworks is using it as the central clock source for a number of grooveboxes that accept analog clock input, such as a handful of Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators. Once your desired patterns are individually set up on each unit, Clockworks affords the ability to easily synchronize them together and explore the relationships of dividing the clock speed for each PO, and discovering the resulting rhythmic interplay. Polyrhythms and manipulation of divisions to achieve identical clock rates at different phases can serve as the basis for intriguing musical compositions, and can add interest to otherwise basic patterns and musical ideas.

Group Favorites: Oceans 12 & Tri-Parallel Mixer

The Electro Harmonix Oceans 12 is no doubt one of the most powerful reverb pedals available. Admittedly, I've overlooked it for a considerable amount of time—possibly because of the (comparatively low?) price, possibly because I (erroneously) assumed it was a slightly more feature-rich version of their previous Oceans 11, possibly because I've never been terribly fond of heist movies. But make no mistake...Oceans 12 is an incredible tool not only for adding a sense of space to your sound, but also for designing sounds and creating dynamic ambiences that respond to your playing.

Oceans 12 is fully stereo, and features two reverb engines which can operate in Series or in Parallel—so yes, you can pass your sound into two separate "spaces" simultaneously, or can allow one "space" to cascade into another. That's already a big deal, especially given that (again) each of these reverbs is fully stereo...so it's super fast and easy to dial in any number of engrossing, unreal sounds.

Again, any of these algorithms could be applied to either of the Oceans 12's internal reverb engines—and these engines can run in parallel or in series. So you could send a reverse reverb into a resonator, or a polyphonic reverb into an auto-infinite reverb; and each engine can even run the same algorithm at the same time with independent settings—great for getting more out of a single mode. Tide control adds stereo panning automation, and Lo-Fi parameter, which alters the audio fidelity of the diffusion process for additional degraded flavors of any combination of the device's internal algorithms.

And that's not even the half of it. With assignable expression control, selectable trails/no-trails bypass operation, optional mono reverbs with a feedback FX send/return, preset memory, and loads of tonal customization options, there seems to be no end to Oceans 12's possibilities. Frankly, it's remarkable that Electro-Harmonix can produce a reverb like this at its price point—many of its sonic possibilities aren't available in any single unit even at considerably higher prices. Whether you're a guitarist or a keyboardist, whether you're looking for a simple reverb or set of tools for designing endless evolving soundscapes, Oceans 12 is sure to give you exactly what you need.

The Takeaway? EHX is Rad

Electro-Harmonix has been on the leading edge of audio signal processing for decades. Their tools are ubiquitous, sure, but there's more to it than just that: many of their tools have come to define the sound of countless styles of music—offering musicians entire new paradigms of sonic exploration. Perhaps inventing the very concept of amp overdrive, proliferating the usage of fuzz, and creating the first compact processors for flangers, delay, and much more, EHX has a track record of bringing creative tools to musicians...even when it's not entirely clear what musical future those tools will produce.

We see the modern EHX lineup as fitting entirely into this history. Sure, they still make classic fuzzes and overdrives...but they also make FM-able pitch shifters, spectral freezing effects, re-configurable reverbs, synthesizer sequencing utilities, and more. Because of their popularity, it's easy to think that EHX is "just another" big player in the pedal game—and they are—but that doesn't mean that they aren't still innovating to this very day. They are...and as a result, EHX is every bit as weird and amazing as it ever has been. Whether you're a guitarist, synthesist, or studio musician, odds are that EHX makes a thing or two that could turn your musical world upside-down.