Gamechanger Audio is a boutique guitar pedalmaker from Riga, Latvia. The company was founded in November 2015. The name ‘Gamechanger’ stands for ‘an idea or discovery that causes a significant shift in the way of thinking or doing’.
Think of the Wah Wah, Big Muff, Echoplex and the Talkbox. All of them pedals that have shaped the history of music.
Exactly the same they are planning in Latvia. The first pedal that came out of the ‘barn’ in Riga is the PLUS pedal. The men worked on it for about two years. After a successful crowdfunding campaign and introduction at the Winter Namm 2017 it went into production in August ’17.
Gamechanger Audio Plus Pedal
The Plus pedal looks like a sustain pedal of a piano and that’s what it looks like most in terms of sound and appearance. By constantly sampling the incoming sound, sustain occurs when the pedal is pressed. The pedal captures the 2nd half of the incoming signal and makes a loop of it. This loop can be affected with a number of buttons.
With the blend button you set the volume of the effect (‘the wet signal’) and with the rise button the speed of the fade-in. Tail hits the speed at which the effect disappears as soon as the pedal is released. With a switch, you choose to sampel one layer (Single) or up to 5 layers (Group). The sustain button lets you determine how the hold function works (Single mode) or the number of simultaneous layers (Group mode).
In practice it is a very nice pedal, which sounds very good and with which you can have hours of fun. Especially if you use the effect loop of this pedal you can ‘build’ unique sounds. The pedal is also very strong and will last a long time on your pedalboard. The reactions to the PLUS pedal are also positive, see for example this review of Sound on Sound and this one from Premier Guitar.
Gamechanger Audio Plasma Pedal
The success of the PLUS Pedal was a great inspiration for Gamechanger and the starting point for the second pedal: the Plasma Pedal. A crowdfunding campaign was also set up to create about 300,000 USD.
This is a fuzz pedal that transforms the guitar signal into high voltage plasma discharges. This technique creates a heavy, transparent distortion with a unique sound character and lightning-fast dynamic response. The discharges take place in a tube filled with special gas. The nice thing about this pedal is that you can see your guitar signal(!), you can see the electrical discharges as you play.
Natural noise gate
Furthermore, the effect pedal has a natural noise gate because there is no output signal if there is no play. There are extreme contrasts between individual notes because all the sound between the notes is filtered out. So also all the accidentally touched strings.
How does all this sound? You get a large amount of so-called non-lineare harmonic saturation that creates rich and responsive sounds with beautiful overtones. In particular, the harmonic artifacts that are a byproduct of the way this pedal works are unusual in traditional signal amplification. The Plasma pedal has now been put into production and is on sale today at Pedaltown.