Delicious Audio: Level Up With These 8-Bit Guitar Pedals
Delicious Audio recently rounded up and reviewed a series of 8-Bit guitar pedals. We set it up for you here, but click thru to read the feature.
FX Doctor’s Super 8 Bit Fuzz
Hearing the term ’8 bit audio’ probably makes you think of old school arcade games or vintage Nintendo titles, but converting higher quality audio to 8 bits is an effect that can be used to achieve a variety of sounds – including some very cool guitar tones.
Reducing the bit depth of a digital audio signal can create sonic artifacts, noise, and distortion that especially affect the overtones of the original audio. While this can certainly produce glitchy, lo-fi, computerized game boy sounds, it can also create crunchy fuzz tones and a wide range of distortion effects. Here’s a selection of pedals that use or approximate the sound of 8 bit audio to create their own unique sonic character.
While it’s not technically an 8 bit pedal, the Super 8 Bit Fuzz ($175) can give you some serious Nintendo tones. A high-gain gated fuzz, it features controls for gain, volume, and stability – the latter of which gives you the most interesting results.
With stability turned down, notes have an immediate attack, then drop off just as abruptly with little to no sustain. When the stability knob is turned up, held notes will drop in pitch instead of volume, and rather than fade away they continue to jump down in pitch until they finally glitch out. Dynamics basically don’t exist with this pedal, which helps give it that lo-fi broken synth vibe. Check out this video demo.
Read the rest of the feature here, featuring pedals by Death By Audio, Freqbox, WMD and more