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Electro Harmonix Freeze - a quick review



Got my Electro Harmonix Freeze today. Here are some observations:

The pedal is small - about 2" across x 4" long. It's only slightly
larger than its wall wart. Yup - the power source is another wall
wart. Some day somebody will think to move the transformer 6" up the
cable instead of at the plug, but until then we can still live like
it's frickin 1985. Also the switch is one of those loud metal
clickers, like on the DL-4. It's easily operated by either hands or
feet.

Now on to the pedal itself. It has 3 modes. In both "Fast" and "Slow"
mode, the pedal engages only while you're holding the switch. It picks
up whatever sound it hears AT THE MOMENT YOU FIRST PRESS THE SWITCH
and makes a drone out of it. The only difference between fast and slow
is what happens when you let go. (Letting go turns the pedal off.)
With fast, the drone instantly ends. With slow, it takes about a half
second to fade out. The most useful mode is probably "latch". In that
mode, the drone continues after you let go of the switch. If you hit
the switch again, it grabs another drone. To turn the pedal off in
this mode, double tap.

None of the modes keep a memory. Once a drone is not playing, it's
lost. There is an effect level knob that lets you control the drone
volume level.

Now, on to sound quality. With smooth sounds such as a guitar or my
"boop" drum machine sound, it sounds close. With something like speech
or typical drum machine sounds, it sounds just a tad murkier, as if
there's a bit of reverb thrown in. I can't quite get a bead on what
interval the loop is at. It does surprisingly well with very short
sounds, but with longer sounds you'll hear a certain ebb and flow,
almost as if it's playing a 1 second sample forward and reverse. At
one point, I swore I heard different harmonics looping at different
time intervals. So yeah - I'm impressed that I don't instantly get how
it works. Lastly, if there's a lot going on when you turn on the
effect (such as when I'm quickly mashing lots of drum machine keys),
it will make a brief coughing sound when you hit the switch, but the
cough will not be part of the drone. Seriously - it sounds like a
cough.

Overall, I'm happy I got it - it will be a useful effect for my rig
and in general recording, where I'm often trying to make tonal sounds
out of non-tonal sounds. I'll be using it at the Tiny Owl concert
tomorrow (tuesday) night.

-- 
Matt Davignon
mattdavignon@gmail.com
www.ribosomemusic.com
Rigs! www.youtube.com/user/ribosomematt