Death By Audio Unleashes The Robot
Death By Audio, a guitar-pedal shop located in Brooklyn, New York, has unveiled a new pedal that may be attractive to synthesists and electronic percussionists. The Robot is an 8-bit, lo-fi scorcher that the company describes as: “The Robot is a low fidelity 8 bit pitch transposer with absolutely no feelings what-so-ever. It is completely synthetic and transforms any input into a spuree of resynthesized robot jargon.” Sounds good to us!
The Robot is quite simple with only a few controls to crush any sound you throw at it. There is a volume knob, a four mode selector switch, and a control knob on the pedal. The four modes of the pedal include: normal 8-bit synthesis fuzz, down, up, and arpeggiation. The fuzz setting produces a “freaked-out trashy fuzz sound” where turning the control knob counter-clockwise bends down the normal pitch of the instrument. The up and down settings produce mangled sounds with lower and higher pitches where the control knob bends pitch and messes up the fidelity even further. The arpeggiation setting transforms the Robot into beautifully sequenced robotalk where the control knob adjusts the speed from slow riffs to speedboat sputtering. This is not a polite overdrive pedal; it is an unwieldy noise machine.
The hand-built Robot works with 9 volt batteries or an AC adaptor and has a lifetime warranty.
Death By Audio’s Robot is not exactly cheap, coming in at a whopping $320, but each unit is put together “with love” and you really can’t put a price on that… More information on the Death By Audio Robot.
