The Earthquaker Devices Transmisser showed up on my doorstep a few days ago. I played it many, many times yesterday. This is, in simplest terms, a reverb pedal. If you’re looking for a great plate, spring reverb.. this is not the pedal for you. If you’re looking to make things a little wet in your guitar signal, this is not the pedal for you. If you’re looking to find God or to understand the cosmos… well, this pedal might be the pedal for you.
I’ve said it multiple times. I love EQD pedals. There is always something unique about them. They definitely have a character. I especially love their delays and verbs. I own and abuse my Dispatch Master, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole with the Disaster Transport SR and the Afterneath. They build machines that go beyond the guitar, and allow you to create. Because of that, some times, the extremes aren’t for everyone. They do an excellent job of covering their bases with the variety of extremeness, and the Transmisser is definitely on the outer limits.
The Transmisser is a modulated reverb. Which means you can get that odd warble with the reverb – similar to tape warble. This control is managed via the Warp and Rate. The other controls that are interesting are Freq and Darkness. There is a highly resonant filter that the frequency interacts with. Darkness is similar to ‘Tone’ and handles the brightness/darkness of the echo tone dispersing. Finally, there is Mix and Decay. Mix is as you expect, but Decay, surprised me. Decay traditionally controls how long the reverb decays after the attack. Even with the Decay all the way counter clockwise, you get gross amounts of decay. Turning it full bore.. well, you go to outer space. There is an expression pedal jack that will control the sweep of the frequency.. so things can get really weird with that. They recommend the Moog EP3 Expression Pedal.
Check out this very good video from Reverb.
Earthquaker Devices Transmisser
I loved this thing for volume swells. Also I loved that if you turn the pedal off, the reverb is still rolling in the unit, but bypassed. You click it it back on and you might get some of the previous reverb happening depending on your decay settings. I like how specialized this pedal is – and as usual, it’s a creation tool. I was coming up with cool ambient riffs immediately.
The Earthquaker Devices Transmisser is available at Amazon for only $225 and in my opinion, is worth every cent. If you own this guy, please comment below and let us know what you think!
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6 years ago
I found this video IRRITATING. Yes, we get that it can be creative and interesting to play with the knobs as the verb decays, and I dig those sounds. But damn, she would not leave the knobs alone! Play something more than a two measure phrase and let the settings demonstrate the sound of the pedal when you play it like a live musician usually does, with both hands playing your instrument. Personally I find it silly when I see a live band and a musician spends more time twiddling knobs than anything else. It can be really effective if done with taste, but very often when a player does this, it becomes gimmick-ey and self indulgent…like “Oh look at me aint I clever when I twiddle my knobs?” I wanted to hear the sound of this pedal! Play a progression, play a long phrase, play against a backing track.
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