“Pull off chord voicings you never thought possible, compose transcendent melodies, orchestrate harmonic ensembles…”: MXR unveils the Layers Pedal, opening a world to adventures in hi-fi guitar sustain

MXR has unveiled the Layers Pedal, a stompbox that takes the signal from your electric guitar and allows you to freeze notes and chords indefinitely, adding octave effects to it and creating the platform for some seriously out-there sounds.

Listening to some of the sound clips, the Layers Pedal comes over as a cross between a delay pedal, looper and the Fernandes Sustainer system and yet sounds like something different entirely, and that is pretty exciting.

We are always on the lookout for a pedalboard wildcard and this could be it. Just imagine what David Gilmour would have done with something like this in the ‘70s. Well, whatever you just imagined you can do in the here and now, taking one layer of sustain and adding it to another.

“Pull off chord voicings you never thought possible, compose transcendent melodies, orchestrate harmonic ensembles, create lively stereo pads, and more,”says MXR.

It’s a tantalising prospect. The most interesting guitar effects pedals are often the most difficult to describe, those that we have to hear first before beginning to understand them, but ultimately need to spend an afternoon turning knobs and playing around with the sounds to map out its potential. 

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Soundscapists are going to have a field day with this, but even in more conventional playing applications we can see the potential for this as a compositional tool, perhaps in allowing you to lay down a chordal part to play over, or to activate the sub-octave switch and play a low drone that sets the table melodically for a riff. All this and more is up for grabs here.

While the Layers Pedal resists easy description, MXR promises that it offers an intuitive user experience, with just four knobs, and a couple of buttons for how you want to arrange the features. 

There’s a Mix knob to control the wet/dry mix. The Trigger knob controls the sensitivity of the auto-trigger function, so you can control when the Layers effect is activated. Thereafter, you dial it in a little bit as you would a reverb, using Attack to adjust the fade-in time of your layers and the Decay dial to adjust how long it takes to fade-out. 

Once you start to get to grips with the sounds you can get, MXR presents you with plenty of ways of customising how you get those sounds, with an expression pedal input to make this more performance friendly – or you could set up an external tap switch to engage the sustain effect. Players can play up to three layers of sustain, each has its own colour-coded LED.

MXR advises players to first think of how many layers they want to use. If just one, press the Single switch. Play a note, hold the footswitch down and it will sustain as long as you are holding the footswitch. 

Upon releasing it, your layer will fade out as per your Decay time settings. Alternatively, get creative with that auto-trigger mode, adjusting the Trigger dial to stack your layers together as you play.

The Layers Pedal is priced £249/$219 and is out now. See Jim Dunlop for more details.