Sometimes, we at Pedal of the Day discover a pedal that is so fun, has so many options and expands our current version of musical enlightenment that it’s hard to play anything else for a while. Today’s featured pedal is exactly along those lines: genre-bending, hard-to-define and definitely in-your-face, the BitQuest Multi-Effect is a site to behold, and a pleasure to hear. From our neighbors to the north, Dr. Scientist, this pedal combines 8 different pedals into one, with enough controls to make noises both normal and out of this world.
As we said, there are 8 different digital you can choose from here: Flanger, High-Pass/Low-Pass Filters, Bit Crusher, Reverb, Notch Filter, Ring Modulator, Pitch Shift and Delay. It’s basically like having an entire pedalboard at your disposal in one pedal. There’s are two main modes you can select from, too: Clean and Fuzz. All the modes work with both modes, but the controls are different depending on the configuration. CTRL0, CTRL1 and CTRL2 all perform different actions and have different uses with each effect, and in each mode (see the videos below for a better explanation, it’s much faster).
Along the those three control knobs, the BitQuest features Tone, Volume and Mix controls, which help to shape the sounds in the individual effects. Mix is nice, as you can dial in as much or as little of any effect you want into your signal path, and Volume helps adjust on the fly, when some of the noisier, oscillating effects start to get real nuts. Tone is key as well, allowing you to play with differing high and low frequencies, further shaping and distorting the sound. There’s an expression pedal input control as well, that lets you control the sweep of the CTRL0 knob with your foot, for even more live and crazy sounds.
So many sounds were produced from each mode that we felt the only way to showcase each was to do 2 separate demo videos, which are available for your viewing pleasure below. These only scratch the surface, too, of what this pedal can do, but will hopefully give you some ideas about how you can use it in your rig. Thanks so much to Ryan and Dr. Scientist for sending this awesome machine our way. We hope to have more of their gear to review in the near future, so stay tuned!
Operation: Mono input, mono output
Power Requirements: 9VDC @ 75mA, 18VDC @ 150mA, 2.1mm center negative plug
Input/Output Impedance: 500kΩ/1kΩ
Bypass: True bypass using soft touch switch and relay
Knobs
Mix: Dry signal only at min, Wet signal only at full
Vol: Wet signal levelTreble:+/-15dB peaking filter centred at 3kHz
CTRL0: In Fuzz Mode this is the gain control, in Clean Mode this controls an effect parameter, depends on patch
CTRL1: Controls an effect parameter, depends on patch
CTRL2: Controls an effect parameter, depends on patch
Toggle Switch: Fuzz Mode adds a versatile digital distortion to the effects, Clean Mode takes away the fuzz and adds an extra control parameter
Expression Input: Controls CTRL0, TRS input, 50kΩ
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