Dreadbox shows four new colorful, interestingly-named effect pedals for guitar and synthesizer players: Darkness, Lethargy, Kinematic, and Raindrops
Last Monday I reported about new upcoming Dreadbox effects pedals. At this point, the pedals were still under a blur veil.
Today there was the unveiling. 3 new pedals, a reverb, a phase shifter, and a compressor/filter combo. A delay will come at a later date. All of them have nice, colorful interfaces with interesting names: Darkness, Lethargy, and Kinematic.
Dreadbox Darkness
Darkness is a stereo reverb aka gated shimmer reverb with different hands-on features. The internal DSP uses a single algorithm and is running at 32bit and 44.1 kHz and offers true stereo processing via stereo inputs/outputs on the back. It has variable pitch shift (+/- 12 semitones), variable gate options, and time scale with modulation. Plus, you have a lovely freeze function that loops 150ms of the input signal. Darkness doesn’t offer patch points.
According to Dreadbox, the pedal is capable of creating small/smooth reflections up to huge shimmering and endless reverbs.
Dreadbox Kinematic
Kinematic, Greek world for motion is a pedal that can be a compressor or a filter. On the one side, it can pump and boost the incoming signal thanks to its full analog VCA based compressor up to +18dB with a band-boost filter and extreme compression ratio. On the other, it is also a lowpass filter with which you can shape the signal with the internal slow envelope curve. Cool, the filter cutoff, level, and envelope follower are available for patching.
Dreadbox Lethargy
The third new release is Lethargy and is an OTA-based fully analog 8-stage phase shifter effect pedal. As the name suggests, this is an effect that is equated with little energy. It uses a built-in LFO with two different LFO waves with a wide range from several seconds up to 110Hz.
There are CV inputs that make communication with your modular system possible. You can control the manual sweep, rate plus CV output for the LFO. Lethargy is great for flexible vibrato effects and anything between.
One More Thing
In Apple fashion: there is one more thing, but that will be officially announced later. Raindrops will be a stereo delay/loop pedal with time, feedback, and mix controls. It will also feature a tap-tempo switch. More about this pedal later this year.
Nice new effect pedals, which were developed not only for guitars but also for synthesizers. The pedals look very nice and sound very solid at first glance. The extra patch points on two pedals are a nice addon.
Dreadbox Darkness will be available in Summer 2021 for 259€, Kinematic in April for 179€, and Legthargy also in April for 199€.
More information here: Dreadbox
These sound great – I’ve never been excited about a compressor until this one (well and the one on the NeonEgg Planetarium 2 also…). I love the sound of the Darkness. I actually thought I’d be most excited by the Lethargy, but it actually excited me the least. I thought it would have a bit more wildness (perhaps it is this particular demo).
I hope Raindrops gets some CV controls between now and release. That would make it super special… I love that about the Komorebi.
One nice thing I am noticing is that each one has the identical knob layout, similar switches, and similar CV outputs. This at least makes the casing and knobs close to identical for manufacturing and helps keep costs down.