Gamechanger Audio’s latest product Light Pedal is now available online and across all dealer channels. The LIGHT Pedal uses the Optical Spring reverb system developed by the company and opens doors to some new, unheard analog effects like optical reverb tremolo, optical reverb modulation, feedback and optical harmonic shimmer.
After Light Pedal’s first public appearance at Winter NAMM 2020, the company put the optical spring reverb concept under the scope for an extra year to improve and complete the final production version. Recently, the first batch of one thousand units has been successfully shipped out to all the backers who supported the product’s pre-order campaign back in February 2020. Now the new Light Pedal is available for everyone.
The main developer of the new Optical Spring reverb concept is Gamechanger Audio’s youngest engineer Teodors Kerimovs. The company has released a video interview with Teodors where he talks in detail about the development process of Light Pedal – from the first experiments to the final product.
Optical Spring Reverb System
The LIGHT Pedal is the world’s first analog optical spring reverb system that uses infra-red optical sensors. This system is used to harvest the full timbral and harmonic range of the spring reverb tank. The LIGHT Pedal combines the best features of a classic spring reverb with the innovative optical sensor system and a powerful effects section. This combination opens up countless new types of reverb textures and sounds never heard before.
The LIGHT Pedal uses extremely sensitive optical sensors directed at different points of the spring. The optical sensors detect very subtle movements on the spring’s surface as sound-waves travel through it. This method allows to pick up a much wider range of frequencies, overtones and textures otherwise lost in the mechanical reverberation process. The optical sensors also open doors to effects that are new to spring reverbs, such as tremolo, modulation, feedback, and added harmonics. The result is a wide variety of reverb sounds ranging from classic to experimental to pure magic.
The LIGHT Pedal’s user interface pushes the boundaries of spring reverb even further. The extended signal mix section allows for a very precise balance between the dry, classic reverb tone and the new and optical reverb signals. The ability to stack various effects and control them with playing dynamics or an expression pedal makes this pedal an advanced tool for sonic exploration.
About Gamechanger | Audio (www.gamechangeraudio.com)
Gamechanger | Audio was founded by four friends committed to exploring uncharted music electronics territories to create devices that provide real value while stretching the imagination of both musicians and engineers.
The Latvian company has been praised for innovation in creating its inaugural PLUS Pedal — the world’s first sustain and sostenuto pedal for all melodic instruments, ingeniously based around a proprietary audio algorithm that lets users capture and sample small parts of the connected instrument’s signal in real-time and loop them into a seamless, warm, and responsive sustained tone — and its PLASMA Pedal followup, forming the basis of a revolutionary approach within the realm of overdrive and distortion by transforming the connected instrument’s live signal into a series of continuous high-voltage discharges within a xenon-filled tube.
The latter has since been applied to the PLASMA Rack – a 1U sized high-end audio effects unit designed for professional and studio use and PLASMA Drive module for the ever-popular Eurorack small-format modular system, created in close collaboration with fellow Latvian company Erica Synths. Saying that, there are many more game-changing (and head-scratching) ideas in the making — not least the revolutionary electro-mechanical MOTOR Synth, successfully realising a new method of analogue audio signal synthesis.
