Gamechanger Plasma Pedal

[GGBB]

A buddy told me about this the other day:

https://youtu.be/MsUJxcTFRYI?t=1m38s

Very interesting idea, but I'm not sure it actually sounds that great - but okay I suppose.  It sounds like most other heavy distortions to me, just with a lot more gating. Any love for this?

[vigilante397]

I just came accross this video in my youtube feed yesterday. It's a neat idea, but I feel like I can get any of those tones with a fuzz factory.

[ElectricDruid]

Lol. A desperate attempt to do something new in a hopelessly overcrowded marketplace. They more or less admit as much straight up: "I was asking my engineers why do we have to use transistors or tubes or whatever...".
You don't. You have to have an idea first, and then execute it and refine it, not come up with the marketing strategy ("uses components you've never heard before") and then build the pedal to fit it.

Did I mention my latest thermonuclear fuzz based on caesium decay? The spattery fade out is guaranteed to be quantum unstable!

[dschwartz]

I had a booth right next to them at this summer NAMM. Really nice, hard working guys from Latvia. I loved their creativity and the plasma pedal really sounds huge and aggressive. And yes, you can do something similar with misbiased BJTs, but seeing the "lighting" reaction to ypur playing is much fun.
For what i understood, they use some kind of halogen lamp bulb with hundreds of volts

[Rixen]

that's a xenon flashlamp tube, as used in large camera flash units/strobes. Probably takes over 1000V to cause it to breakdown like that without using a trigger pulse...

[ElectricDruid]

I think maybe I was being a bit mean last night. It *is* kind of fun to throw kilovolts at something that blatantly doesn't need kilovolts, and the lightshow certainly looks cool. But I still think it's a NAMM attention-getter rather than a serious product. Still, NAMM is a busy place and if you want to get noticed and reported on, you probably need something like that. Here we are talking about it, so I guess it worked.

[dschwartz]

Yup..
They got my respect just because they had an idea and had to go further than the usual online schematics to get it working. There is actually some research and serious design efforts into it.
It was funny that we were between gamechanger and Vertex FX booths..guess who had the most interesting pedals, and guess who had all the attention and buzz..

[bluebunny]

Did I mention my latest thermonuclear fuzz based on caesium decay? The spattery fade out is guaranteed to be quantum unstable!

So when are you off to NAMM, Tom?   

[duck_arse]

Did I mention my latest thermonuclear fuzz based on caesium decay? The spattery fade out is guaranteed to be quantum unstable!

So when are you off to NAMM, Tom?   

he's probably uncertain.

[chuckd666]

It brings something fun to a now predictable marketplace imho.

[stallik]

I saw an Andertons video of this pedal during he show. What got me was how the Andertons guys went pretty bananas over it. Or rather the look of it. I think they thought it would sell because of this and they're probably right.
The men in black look said it all.

Caesium decay fuzz? Bring it on if it looks pretty. The only reason for led's on my builds is to make them sound better in the dark 

[karbomusic]

For what i understood, they use some kind of halogen lamp bulb with hundreds of volts

I was lucky to grow up in a family of tinkerers, as a teenager, my uncle gave me a 15k volt neon transformer to play with. Around age 16, it was science project time so I built a Jacob's ladder - interesting enough, but the A+ grade came from to the fact I had torn an old Mercury based street lamp apart, took out the inner element and attached it to the ladder which gave off this eerie blue glow - meaning, it's often all about perception - even the teacher thought the lamp had something to do with the magic - but it was only there for psychological effect, and it worked.

Not that the light here isn't doing something, just chiming in on the idea of "wow factor" selling product.

[GGBB]

Not that the light here isn't doing something, just chiming in on the idea of "wow factor" selling product.

I guess it depends on the audience. Me - I see stuff like that and immediately think gimmick and dismiss it as having no true substance.

[Mark Hammer]

Daniel probably got/had to listen to the Plasma pedal more than I did.  I heard a bit, and while it sounded okay, there was very little "where has this been all my life?" for me.  I think the Gamechanger guys, nice as they are, and diligent as they are, probably have a better product in the Plus pedal than in the Plasma one. The Plus is a useful step up from the EHX Freeze, in terms of usability.  I accept that a pedal which inspires a player can bring something out of them that may not always easily come out.  And I also accept that, as dumb a concept as relic-ing is, it can also have the same effect on a player.  But watching a display on a pedal while you play is, for me, just distracted driving.  Perhaps there is something magnificent when one tweaks the knobs just right, but I didn't get to hear it.

[dschwartz]

Believe me i heard too much of the plasma
I'm not a fuzz guy, so i found it interesting, but i wouldn't buy one, well actually i would never buy a drive pedal anyway.
And yes, the plus pedal was really something.. it has a lot of features that makes it a bit confusing. But i heard many inspired players trying it out and that means it is useful.

These guys set up a livestream connected to an Arduino with servo motors moving the plasma pedal knobs, so that you could adjust it online from home..poor guys were exhausted setting that up....

[Danich_ivanov]

Not necessarily a game changer, but looks like a fun pedal.

[karbomusic]

I guess it depends on the audience. Me - I see stuff like that and immediately think gimmick and dismiss it as having no true substance.

I was just being respectful for the most part - I have a sine wave, I want to chop it off in an interesting way, we can mojo that idea into oblivion or understand we're just "distorting a waveform for the most part". Meaning the waveform doesn't really care how it came to be clipped/misshapen and the diminishing audial returns as to the number of ways to do that goes up pretty quickly, no matter what magic one used to do it.

[GGBB]

I was just being respectful for the most part - I have a sine wave, I want to chop it off in an interesting way, we can mojo that idea into oblivion or understand we're just "distorting a waveform for the most part". Meaning the waveform doesn't really care how it came to be clipped/misshapen and the diminishing audial returns as to the number of ways to do that goes up pretty quickly, no matter what magic one used to do it.

I like the idea of asking how else can a waveform be distorted, because that can lead to innovation which may lead to different sounds. We know that different diodes - which all distort the same way - can sound different. So finding a different way of distorting the waveform, could easily create new sounds. But if the goal and result aren't about new sound, then why bother? That's what I think when I see something gimmicky - it's about the gimmick not the sound. I have much the same reaction to overstated marketing hype.

[vigilante397]

But if the goal and result aren't about new sound, then why bother?

Agreed. I watched the video hoping to be blown away by this amazing new concept and was not blown away.

[karbomusic]

But if the goal and result aren't about new sound, then why bother?

I agree, no one should stop looking either, but I am saying the low-hanging fruit has been picked over pretty well, which by default means there a far fewer ways to modify the sound - using the gimmick could be a sincere method but as shown in the video, even that plasma circuit didn't make 'that' much difference? I'm going to stick with the waveform thing though because ultimately there is nothing else other than it's final shape that creates what we hear - which is what moves the speaker that rides voltage fluctuations which it created.

Not trying to devalue our mission though!