Warm and cozy.

War on tone.

We’re continuing our war on tone by addressing one of the biggest problems with vintage and modern chorus/vibrato pedals. We’re going to be talking cold tone, our fix, and we’ll take you for a spin through some sounds of our Aakii (ah-gee) chorus/vibrato to show you what it means to have great tone that’s warm and cozy.

A nightmare.

Imagine this one. You’re a bass player, the crowd is cheering, and it’s your move. You want to bring the energy to the next level, and you happen to remember that chorus pedal you picked up for this exact situation. While the hype is still going, you engage and what the?! Your bass has immediately been thinned out, leaving your tone malnourished and seeking for more “umph.” Have you been there, what exactly is happening, and what’s the fix?

A personal beef.

First of all, we need to stop pretending like current chorus pedals in the market don’t sound cold and metallic. I’m not sure when it became the standard to thin out the bass and emphasize the highs, but we’ll take a pass on this one. We believe that chorus was truly meant to be expressed in all frequency ranges of the spectrum. You’d never throw a birthday party and leave out your best friends, right? So why do this to your chorus tone then?

The science and stuff.

We’re going to get nerdy for a second. In a typical chorus/vibrato analog design, you’re faced with a challenge to cut the low frequencies in hopes to not drive the delay chip into saturation and when you do finally make it through the delay chip, your signal picks up all these wild, high-frequency artifacts. The result is a pedal that, in the audio spectrum, looks like a friend with a bad haircut. Too much off the bottom and way too much on the top. How do we achieve a solid chorus tone then?

Digital done well.

Remember in video games where you can create your own character or do other things like build your fantasy house? Designing pedals in the digital realm is kind of the same but these items end up becoming real sounds that exist on the stage or in your jam space. With the digital structure of Aakii, we can tweak specific frequencies and make the audio design totally flexible. You could still achieve a similar filtering capability in an analog design, but it would be pure chaos, resulting in a design that is component heavy and most likely, more expensive.

What does this mean for my tone?

Okay, we say all of this about filtering and design but what does this mean for Aakii and your tone? Well, it means that Aakii is equipped to deliver a warm and welcoming modulated tone. We went under the hood, found where the bass was being cut and the highs were being emphasized, and removed all of that nonsense. The result is a modulation pedal that feels like you’re cuddled up to a fireplace with warm and cozy blanket.

Who is Aakii for?

If you’re a musician that has always struggled with chorus because it’s either been too bright or you lose all your low-end content, I challenge you to let Aakii bring your chorus tone back to life. We’ve rewritten what it means to chorus by designing a pedal that’s warm and delivers great tones in a gig-friendly format.

A short comment about the video.

We take Aakii out for a quick test drive with bass and play around with the various settings that Aakii has to offer. If you have headphones that would be perfect but either way, pay close attention to how the low-end notes retain structure while the highs still come through but are not too dramatic. All of these subtle qualities combine to deliver a sound that has flavor without sacrificing tone. Enjoy.

Let’s make some noise!

Now that we’ve explored the possible, let’s go and create the impossible. Visit here for Aakii.