Now here is a guitar effects pedal that is all kinds of nuts, places all kinds of sounds at your feet, and exists somewhere way outside of the regular overdrive, modulation, delay and reverb continuum – it’s called the Ottobit X, and the very fact that it is from Meris, and commands a whopping $599 price tag, tells us that we are in for something completely different.
Maybe even something weird. Meris describe the Ottobit X as a “modular degradation and texture engine” with lo-fi sounds inspired by a nostalgia for the ‘80s. This is where cutting-edge digital signal processing is leveraged to recreate old-school analogue and early digital sounds, and there is so much going on with the Ottobit X that it is difficult to know where to start.
Terry Burton, founder and engineer of Meris, says the R&D project took him way back to his salad days. “This project was one of our funnest,” he says. “It took me back to the days of riding my BMX to pick out a VHS.”
Should we think of the Ottobit X as a de facto time machine for our electric guitar tone? It has the features to invoke ‘80s sounds, with a heap of effects on offer. There are six types of glitch effects, including Grain Freeze, Stutter, Tape Stop, Stutter Step, Push Loop and, our favourite, Wikki Wikki, the latter a real-time vinyl scratching looper.
Because we all know that a little degradation on a signal can make a tone better, the Ottobit X has all kinds of tool at its disposal for degrading your guitar signal in a way that makes it sound pleasing. The Sample Rate dial has a huge range to it, taking you from 48Hz to 48Khz. There is a Bits dial that can adjust the bit depth of your signal from 1 to 24 bits.
Players can then consult the services of the Filter knob to dial in the filter’s cut-off frequency, making it darker or brighter to taste. There are three different filters; Ladder, State Variable and Otto Tron.
And there’s more. There is VHS delay and VHS reverb to add depth and space. There are five pitch effects and five different types of modulation. Again – Ring Mod, Div Trem, Tape Mod, Freq Shift, Otto Vibe – these are not vanilla modulation choices.
Furthermore, you can colour your sound with four preamps, including Volume Pedal, Tube, Vinyl and Wavefold.
When you find a favourite sound, you can save it down to any one of 99 presets stored across 33 banks. Cycle through the presets via the footswitches, and manage them with via the colour display screen. The pedal supports full stereo and MIDI and ships with 18 artist presets.
The sounds samples include the weird horror soundtrack synths, blissed out dream tones and videogame skronk, and we’re really only scratching the surface here on what is sure to be a pedalboard powerhouse for adventurous players. The best thing you can do is watch the demo videos above (sadly on YouTube and not VHS) and head over to Meris for more.
