Chase Bliss Mystery Box -> Onward (NPD)

[bnt]

Well, I’ve gone and done something that might be bloody stupid or turn out positive: signed up to get a Chase Bliss Mystery Box:

 

They’re promising that for €299 I’ll receive one or more pedals & goodies with a value of €399 or higher, but I won’t know just what in advance. Chase Bliss pedals tend to be weird things that you don’t really need as such, and the prices have put me off a bit, but this might be worth a punt. They do hold value on the market too. 

Edited 22 hours ago by bnt
NPD

[bnt]

Chase Bliss has already closed orders due to the demand, so if you were thinking about it, it looks like you’ll need to wait a year! 
 

I’ll post about what I get after the box arrives, which won’t be this year. It should contain one of their current pedals, all of which look like fun. Which would I like the most?

• Onward
• Mood Mk.II
• Blooper
• Reverse Mode C (not much chance of that TBH)

[bnt]

I bet you all forgot about this, but I didn’t, and the Mystery Box arrived today. A keyring, a sticker, and just one pedal… but it’s the one at the top of my list: the Onward. Happy? Very. It will get its own NPD post once I get home after work and try it out with the Bass VI. 🤓

 

edit: might not do a NPD post, at least not yet. I did some tests with my active fretless directly in, but suspect I wasn't feeding it enough level. It could use some compression and other stuff in front, so I want it on my board, which will have to wait till the weekend, probably. But it is promising so far, and already stumbled on some fun settings that are very responsive to what I play.

Edited Monday at 21:36 by bnt

[LukeFRC]

I found a video of bass on an onward - it sounded fantastic 

[jimbobothy]

19 hours ago, LukeFRC said:

I found a video of bass on an onward - it sounded fantastic 

…. please share the link Luke!

[LukeFRC]

Someone using it on bass! 

[bnt]

This guy uses the pedals in a mixer's effects loop: I don't use a mixer on my board, but the Onward's Mix control can keep the dry signal in. I could also break out the DSM&H Simplifier Bass clone again and use it as a splitter, but I think there will be times when I will want the signal fully wet, so maybe not.

[bnt]

This may as well be a NPD thread too, I suppose. The Onward isn't a bass pedal, and most videos on YT show people feeding it everything but bass. I've started with my Squier CV Bass VI, and today I rebuilt my "big" board to accommodate it, putting it just after a TC SpectraDrive, Tone City Matcha Cream fuzz, and the Boss MD-200 stereo out.

 

The core of the Onward is two audio looping sections:

1. Glitch looper, which captures up to 1 second of audio (or 2 seconds in 1/2 speed mode), the time controllable by a knob or synced to a MIDI clock.
2. Freeze, a granular looper that does what it says - takes audio and "freezes" it, similar to a pedal like the TC Electronics Freeze or others.

Both sections can be switched on or off separately. The big difference here is that the each section listens for input over a certain threshold, and replaces the current loop/freeze with that. So you can e.g. play a "frozen" chord progression without touching the pedal. How long it plays, if you stop playing, is controlled by a common Sustain knob: at max, it will loop/freeze forever. (There is a Manual switch in case you don't want this "dynamic sampling".) You can stop each section from recording by holding its footswitch for a second - then the current loop/freeze is latched and keeps playing.

 

There's a 3-position fade switch, from slow fade in and out to no fade. There's an Error section that lets you add a controllable amount of glitchiness to the playback, with 3 switchable types of glitch. With the Octave control you can blend in an upper or lower octave, the upper being a "shimmer" effect at maximum. Lastly there's a switchable vibrato or chorus section. It takes an expression pedal too, and I've used mine to control the Error amount on the fly.

 

On YT there are quite a few long review videos up, showcasing the pedal with more skill that I might ever be able to.  It's probably got more computing power than the entire Apollo Space Program, running off a 9V pedal power supply. So why did I get it? Well, through the Mystery Box program it was about 40% off RRP, and I felt like taking a chance on something really different.

 

After the pedal I have the t.mix MicroMix 2 feeding headphones, and optionally my iPad over USB. I have an app called Gauss Field Looper which emulates a tape loop, and tried recording in to that. I can change and reverse the loop speed, overdub at the current speed, and so on.

[LukeFRC]

10 minutes ago, bnt said:

This may as well be a NPD thread too, I suppose. The Onward isn't a bass pedal, and most videos on YT show people feeding it everything but bass. I've started with my Squier CV Bass VI, and today I rebuilt my "big" board to accommodate it, putting it just after a TC SpectraDrive, Tone City Matcha Cream fuzz, and the Boss MD-200 stereo out.

 

The core of the Onward is two audio looping sections:

1. Glitch looper, which captures up to 1 second of audio (or 2 seconds in 1/2 speed mode), the time controllable by a knob or synced to a MIDI clock.
2. Freeze, a granular looper that does what it says - takes audio and "freezes" it, similar to a pedal like the TC Electronics Freeze or others.

Both sections can be switched on or off separately. The big difference here is that the each section listens for input over a certain threshold, and replaces the current loop/freeze with that. So you can e.g. play a "frozen" chord progression without touching the pedal. How long it plays, if you stop playing, is controlled by a common Sustain knob: at max, it will loop/freeze forever. (There is a Manual switch in case you don't want this "dynamic sampling".) You can stop each section from recording by holding its footswitch for a second - then the current loop/freeze is latched and keeps playing.

 

There's a 3-position fade switch, from slow fade in and out to no fade. There's an Error section that lets you add a controllable amount of glitchiness to the playback, with 3 switchable types of glitch. With the Octave control you can blend in an upper or lower octave, the upper being a "shimmer" effect at maximum. Lastly there's a switchable vibrato or chorus section. It takes an expression pedal too, and I've used mine to control the Error amount on the fly.

 

On YT there are quite a few long review videos up, showcasing the pedal with more skill that I might ever be able to.  It's probably got more computing power than the entire Apollo Space Program, running off a 9V pedal power supply. So why did I get it? Well, through the Mystery Box program it was about 40% off RRP, and I felt like taking a chance on something really different.

 

After the pedal I have the t.mix MicroMix 2 feeding headphones, and optionally my iPad over USB. I have an app called Gauss Field Looper which emulates a tape loop, and tried recording in to that. I can change and reverse the loop speed, overdub at the current speed, and so on.

Nice - ild love to know how you get on with it with bass - I only found out what onward was by accident a couple of days back - and seemingly got quite excited by the possibilities!