Right, review time.
Feber is my mostestest favoritestestest pedal of the last 2 or 3 years.
End of the review.
No, seriously, as some of you might know, i have been searching for a dedicated freq shifting pedal for a while, found a couple of suitable ones but never had the chance to try those because they were hard to find or pricey or didn't have all the features i wanted.
Then Feber came out, and the moment I saw the picture and the knobs labels I knew it was what I was looking for even before I heard a single demo of it.
The huge range of FREQ, paired with the HI/SUB switch, is the first thing that surprised me when I plugged it. From super-slow phaser sounds to aliasing-ish frequencies and everything in between.
Are you getting tired of hi-freq ring modulated sounds for extraterrestrial communication? flip that switch on SUB on you'll be sucked in a vortex of warm phasing, or flip it again in the middle position and a tremulating filter will run up your spine and choke you up.
In every setting, FEEB (Feedback) lets you dial in the modulation from subtle settings to totally overloaded mess.
It's not fundamental for pure bell-like tones, but to me it is particularly useful when using it for comb-filtering/phasing, with low to mid freq range, as at high feedback levels it starts to sound almost like a flanger - yeh i know it's a different thing, but the feeling is close.
The BAND knob: this is probably my favorite feature of the pedal, because you can set very precisely the amount of signal you want to hear from both sidebands.
In general, it's interesting to turn it in every possible setting, and see how it changes the complexity of the modulation.
When in low freq range, combined with the feedback knob, it sounds like you're adding or subtracting stages on a phaser.
I love to set the freq high, set BAND for (upper) single sideband and then turn it back a bit letting a small amount of the lower sideband appear in the background. Pure bliss.
Probably i would love it if this parameter was assignable to an expression pedal or to the sample&hold side of the pedal.
S&H + INT/STEP: ok, i was skeptical about sample & hold modulation until about a year ago, then learned how to work with it on a different pedal, and now i like it.
The idea of having a dedicated footswitch to activate it, and a switch to choose from stepped or interpolated modes is really useful. Personally my favorite uses of it are:
- Interpolated s&h with low depth values - adds slight movement, either at fast or slow rates
- Interpolated s& with superlow rate and mid/high depth - raising and falling freq fluctuation, very present but without getting seasick
- Stepped s&h with low/mid depth and rate set to a precise tempo - extremely rhythmical without being predictable like a simple square wave, applying this on a cadenced riff or a drum loop is awesome. A cool improvement would be to have an external input to sync the rate to other devices (tap tempo, CV etc).
I've tried to place Feber in the feedback loop of Taken, and with this s&h setting I got some wonderfully chopped and shifted polyrhythms.
Like most Pladask pedals, the dedicated knobs for VOL, MIX (a lot more interacting than in other pedals, for phase cancellation etc), and most importantly TONE, are there, and super useful. I have said this multiple times, and i'll say it again, but the Tone knob, to me, is fundamental in most space & modulation pedals, particularly in freq/pitch/amplitude-shifting ones.
So, in the end, it's awesome and the amount of sounds you can get from it is endless, so endless that I created a cheat sheet to write down some settings.
If anyone needs it, you can find it attached to this message.
