New Music Gear Monday: Gamechanger Audio Plasma Pedal

If you’re a guitar player then you know the joys of playing with distortion. No two ways about it, it’s fun, but with more distortion comes more noise, especially in between notes. That’s no longer a concern if you use the new Plasma Pedal from Gamechanger Audio. It uses a brand new way to create the overdrive and distortion that guitar players love so dearly.

The Plasma Pedal takes an entirely new approach to achieving signal clipping. Instead of using the many traditional electronic variants that range from diodes, transistors, vacuum tubes and LEDs, this unit uses the discharge from a xenon-filled tube to distort the signal. As the company is fond of saying, you’re actually playing a bolt of electricity as the electrical discharges produced by your instrument are instantly converted back into an analog audio signal, producing a quick, responsive, and extremely heavy distortion with lots of unique character along the way.

One of the best features of the Plasma Pedal is that it acts like a natural noise gate since the signal only exists when the gas-filled tube is activated. When you stop playing the signal is interrupted and there’s no output. Have to love that on a recording!

There are 5 controls. Blend is a mix of the wet/dry signal, Voltage configures the intensity of the Plasma discharges, which affects the sustain and responsiveness, Volume is the main output volume, and Low Freq and High Freq. The rear panel features 1/4″ input and output jacks as well as a 9VDC power input jack. There’s also a switch that disables the EQ on the dry input signal. Of course there’s the xenon-filled tube that the unit is built around, and you can watch that glow when it’s activated.

The Gamechanger Audio Plasma Pedal will retail for $299 when it’s released in August but right now you can get for as low as $179 by backing its Indigogo crowdfunding campaign. The campaign has been very successful so far, raising over $150,000 from over 850 backers. There are still 24 days left in the campaign.

Find out more about the pedal from the video below, or visit the Indigogo page for more details. You can also hear what your audio will sound like through the pedal here.