YouTuber Simon The Magpie is now a pedal manufacturer and with Fruits, Bubbles & Moist, he shows three experimental effects pedals.
In recent years, many Synthesizer YouTubers have joined. Each channel has its own style, personality, and content. That’s the coolest thing about YouTube. Anyone can make the synth content they want.
The Swedish musician Simon The Magpie is one of the special personalities on YouTube. His main topics are crazy instruments/effects, DIY projects, circuit bending … everything that is clearly noisier, rougher, and more unusual. From review-entertainment, Simon is now moving into the developer world himself. He recently started making interesting effects pedals. The first products are now available.
Simon decided to design his pedals very colorfully. The case is almost classic silver but adorned with colorful accents like flowers, stars… The knobs are colorful as well. I like the designs, they stand out against pedals from the big players.
Fruits
Starting with Fruits which is a Synthesizer pedal. It uses an oscillator that is fed from the input with two selectable voices. They offer harmonic and disharmonic intervals. The pedal also features an LFO that can modulate the oscillator pitch.
It is capable of creating classic synth sounds but also very dirty, strange sounds. So what we expect from Simon The Magpie.
Bubbles
Bubbles is a lo-fi delay pedal that uses the PT2399 delay chip. So nosy, characterful delays are taken care of. But Simon pimped this sound up again. He incorporated a five-step sequencer that allows you to jump instantly between different delay time values. Five controls gives you full access to the sequencer.
The sound of Bubbles ranges from classic crunchy PT2399 delay tones, rhythmic delays up to delays that got lost in delay. Then, it also offers the possibility to sync it with a 5V gate signal that expands once again the range of possible sounds. Definitely, a crazy take on a delay pedal.
Moist
Last but not least, Moist is also a PT2399 delay pedal but this time one that is constantly in motion. The latter is produced by an internal LFO with depth and speed controls. This gives you everything from a subtle vibe to complete time destruction.
Interesting, the LFO is always on. At the lowest settings, the signal floats with the signal and makes very subtle modulations.
Three very special pedals from Simon The Magpie. All three have a very unique feature set. My favorite is Bubbles with the internal sequencer which can certainly be a lot of fun.
The new Magpie Pedals are available now. Fruits pedal is available for 2250 SEK (+/- 220€), Bubbles for 2600 SEK (254€ +/-), and Moist for 2000 SEK (195€ +/-).
More information here: Magpie Pedals
Simon’s channel is a little over the top for me in general, but I find his stuff always interesting. These pedals aren’t something I will specifically seek out, but just the fact that Bubbles has a sequencer built in made me think what would be possible with a Eurorack module tied to a sequencer. Ye verily, I found that Dreadbox’s Nostalgia has a delay time input, so it could be sequenced.
So in this since, even though I don’t need the pedal per se, Simon inspired an exploration… For this, I am grateful. And I hope he sells a bunch of them!
Can’t wait for the PC Cancel Culture crowd to whine about Simon’s “Moist” the same way they are doing to the Joyo “Moist” Reverb.
Keep fighting the good fight against those windmills.