Well, it appears that we are in a familiar situation, reviewing another dynamite effects pedal from our friends at Keeley Electronics. It seems you can’t take 2 steps forward these days without literally stepping on one of Robert’s pedals (in our office, anyway), which is not necessarily a bad thing. Today’s gem of a pedal features a trio of effects again strewn together into one marvelous (and super space-saving) enclosure, complete with rad graphics and tones for days. The Bubble Tron is a flanger, phaser and filter of sorts, but also much, much more than meets the eye (or ear, we suppose).
The Keeley Crew digs them some Frank Zappa, as they should, and this pedal attempts to re-create some of Frank’s incredible tones from his heyday. Harkening back to Frank’s time period from the late-70’s through the mid-80’s, the Bubble Tron’s Flanger Mode focuses on the legendary MicMix DynaFlanger. The effect in this mode is dynamic, meaning it starts and stops based on your playing, or pick attack, allowing you to control the flange. Plus, there’s no constant whirling and swooshing going on in the background, a feature that turns some players off from flanger effects altogether. You can also use the Feedback and Sensitivity knobs to really dial in the perfect flanger sound for you, utilizing the Depth control to add in as much or as little of the effect as desired as well.
The Phaser portion of the Bubble Tron is unique, too – it’s actually made up of TWO phasers. The first has an LFO (low-frequency oscillator) that you set with the Rate control, while the other is dynamic, like the flanger. Using the Depth and Sensitivity controls here yields a wide array of phaser sounds, and if you want to focus solely on this DynaPhase sound, just turn the Rate all the way down to turn off the regular phaser.
The last section is the Filter, which utilizes the Shape control for different sonic ramps and random sounds. The Sensitivity knob acts like a vintage synth-style bandpass filter control, making it easy to discover and create classic keyboard-type sounds with ease. This mode is super experimental, giving you many interesting and exploratory tones to work with. Like we said, Keeley and crew are big fans of Mr. Zappa, and all these modes on the Bubble Tron let you begin to try and re-create some of his signature tones. You can even use an internal switch to shift the overall production to standard, non-dynamic flanger and phaser sounds (but why would you want to do that?). Check out the demo below fora small sampling of what this cool pedal can do, and make sure to head over to the Keeley website when you’re done!
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