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Looper's Delight
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Got my Electro Harmonix Freeze today. Here are some observations: The pedal is small - about 2" across x 4" long. It's only slightly larger than its wall wart. Yup - the power source is another wall wart. Some day somebody will think to move the transformer 6" up the cable instead of at the plug, but until then we can still live like it's frickin 1985. Also the switch is one of those loud metal clickers, like on the DL-4. It's easily operated by either hands or feet. Now on to the pedal itself. It has 3 modes. In both "Fast" and "Slow" mode, the pedal engages only while you're holding the switch. It picks up whatever sound it hears AT THE MOMENT YOU FIRST PRESS THE SWITCH and makes a drone out of it. The only difference between fast and slow is what happens when you let go. (Letting go turns the pedal off.) With fast, the drone instantly ends. With slow, it takes about a half second to fade out. The most useful mode is probably "latch". In that mode, the drone continues after you let go of the switch. If you hit the switch again, it grabs another drone. To turn the pedal off in this mode, double tap. None of the modes keep a memory. Once a drone is not playing, it's lost. There is an effect level knob that lets you control the drone volume level. Now, on to sound quality. With smooth sounds such as a guitar or my "boop" drum machine sound, it sounds close. With something like speech or typical drum machine sounds, it sounds just a tad murkier, as if there's a bit of reverb thrown in. I can't quite get a bead on what interval the loop is at. It does surprisingly well with very short sounds, but with longer sounds you'll hear a certain ebb and flow, almost as if it's playing a 1 second sample forward and reverse. At one point, I swore I heard different harmonics looping at different time intervals. So yeah - I'm impressed that I don't instantly get how it works. Lastly, if there's a lot going on when you turn on the effect (such as when I'm quickly mashing lots of drum machine keys), it will make a brief coughing sound when you hit the switch, but the cough will not be part of the drone. Seriously - it sounds like a cough. Overall, I'm happy I got it - it will be a useful effect for my rig and in general recording, where I'm often trying to make tonal sounds out of non-tonal sounds. I'll be using it at the Tiny Owl concert tomorrow (tuesday) night. -- Matt Davignon mattdavignon@gmail.com www.ribosomemusic.com Rigs! www.youtube.com/user/ribosomematt