Vintage Revolution | Guitar analogue effects | The analogue revolution draws near

What inspired you to form VR?

As musicians, it seemed to us that more and more products were being developed by big companies that left us wanting for quality. We felt short-changed in some way, whether it was because of integration problems – kilometres of cable destroying the sound – or the lack of storage and recall capabilities for sound parameters, or the sound quality, or the noise and hum. This is in relation to analogue pedals of course.

Analogue effects are still what serious musicians want; generations of DSPs later and the quality is still (and always will be), unsatisfactory. Conventional wisdom told us that you couldn’t combine analogue and digital technology, but what drove us was the real desire for sound quality combined with digital usability – no more limits or constraints to creativity.

Are there any products on the market similar to the PedalPro™?

Quite simply, no. There are some rare analogue multi-effects but these involve putting up with knobs and sliders, have no way of saving and recalling parameters, and their effects don’t work together, they just sit in the same box in a fixed chain. These are all the compromises that we specifically set out to get past with the PedalPro.

On the other side there are digital multi-FX processors, but DSPs are notoriously not nice to your sound. Even if sound quality was a matter of taste, these machines limit the number of effects you can use simultaneously because of the limitations of DSP’s calculation capabilities.

It is also not great to see your machine become obsolete as you drive back from the shop. Analogue sound is timeless. We think that with PedalPro 1 + 1 = 3, because it’s not just the best of analogue and the best of digital - it gives you scope to do things that simply have never been possible to do before.

Is the sound in the PedalPro ever digitised?

Never. This was our starting point – pure analogue effects, no A/D-D/A conversions, no DSP, no signal convolutions in the sound chain. Period. We love the tones of our guitar as much as the next musician and want our Gibson to sound like a Gibson and our Strat to sound like a Strat. In the PedalPro, digital circuitry is only used to control the effects and to make our lives easier. After all, playing is what this is all about.

What do you mean that some effects have been redesigned?

Like many guitarists, we started out using analogue pedals and have enormous respect for the pioneers who designed them. We stood on the shoulders of those giants, so to speak, and looked around at the evolution of analogue electronics and revised every single one of our effects to see if there was room for improvement – using our ears, not lab test equipments, as the final judge. The result is that PedalPro contains a wealth of new circuitry solutions that use the latest and the greatest of analogue components

How is PedalPro upgradeable/expandable?

We loved the endurance of analogue pedals and have always been bothered by the quick obsolesce of digital processors. We therefore imagined and designed the PedalPro to be the core of a musician’s rig for years. We created a line of plug-ins that allows users to expand their machine as well as tailor it to their needs. We are only just beginning to explore the possibilities of this technology.

What if I like my filter before the distortion, instead of after?

Just press a button. We knew that this was the weak spot, the Achilles heel, of an analogue multi-FX rig, and we wanted to avoid this limitation. As it stands, the effect chain in the PedalPro has been carefully chosen and laid out, however we also designed it so that each filter can be physically connected, disconnected and moved to different points in the effect chain – resulting in an incredible nine different possible configurations of the effect chain. This will allow musicians to think outside the box and be free to create.