Chase Bliss Audio / Cooper FX Limited Edition Generation Loss

What’s better than experimenting with a new effects pedal from Chase Bliss Audio? Experimenting with one they created alongside another pioneering company, Cooper FX, for an extremely Limited Edition piece of gear. We saw them team up (along with Keeley Electronics) for the Dark World Dual Reverb, and now they’re expanding on one of Cooper FX’s own marvelous creations. The Generation Loss is familiar to a lot of us in the pedal world, and this special partnership combines the magic of that pedal with the functionality and options-filled prowess we’ve all come to know and love from the Chase Bliss lineup. This effect is weird, awesome, puzzling and glorious all at once – let’s see what all the hype is about…

Starting with the first two knobs, Wow refers to the lower frequency pitch fluctuation that can affect audio played back on tape machines, for slow, gentle pitch fluctuations. Meanwhile, Flutter refers to the relatively fast, random pitch fluctuations that are in large part responsible for “that” tape sound. The Wet (Ramp) knob controls the level of the wet signal, increasing as you turn it clockwise. If a dip switch on the top panel is engaged for ramping, you can set this knob to control any of the five parameters individually or simultaneously (Wow, Flutter, Gen, LP, HP), and have it either modulate (Bounce) or ramp-and-hold (rise or fall). The Gen knob controls the sample rate of the wet signal, decreasing in audio quality as you turn it counter-clockwise. HP and LP control the cutoff frequencies of the High-Pass and Low-Pass filters, respectively, allowing you to narrow in on the high and low frequency signal attenuation to produce that worn-out tape sound.

As always with CBA pedals, there are a few toggle switches to play with on the Generation Loss as well. Aux selects the function applied to the signal when the AUX stomp is pressed. In Mod setting, both the WOW and FLUTTER controls will be maxed out when the footswitch is activated. Setting the toggle to Gen will allow the user to change between the max Gen setting and the knob defined Gen setting each time the footswitch is activated. Finally, the AUX stomp can be used to bypass the filters by setting the toggle to Filter.

The Dry toggle selects the amount of dry signal that is mixed in with the wet signal, letting the use choose from None, Small, or Unity. Subsequently, the Hiss toggle selects from three levels of added noise, using a mixture of white noise and flutter distortion, and can be sculpted with the high pass and low pass filters. The final toggle down below, as always, lets you choose either your real-time settings, or from two separate presets when the toggle is switched to either the left or the right.

There’s a ¼” TRS jack for expression pedal control (parameter selectable via dip switch in the back of the pedal), as well as 0-5V Control Voltage (CV) on tip. There’s a ¼” MIDI/AUX TRS jack as well, used to interface the pedal with a Chase Bliss Midibox. In addition, this can be used as a secondary switch to activate / bypass the AUX FUNC control with a momentary, normally open (NO) switch. As for the Dip Switches, there’s a lot going on here, as usual. The Wow, HP, Flutter, Gen, and LP dip switches on the left side simply turn that parameter on or off for ramping or expression / CV capability, while those on the right side control whether or not the parameters will rise (go clockwise in ramp mode) or fall (go counterclockwise in ramp mode), as well as how the parameters will behave with an expression pedal plugged in.

The other dip switches work as follows:

Bounce: When on (and no expression pedal), parameters will go back and forth (i.e. modulate); if it’s off, parameters will ramp and hold.

MOTAUX / MOTBYP: Momentary engage or bypass for AUX and BYPASS stomps. It changes from “momentary engage” or “momentary bypass” dependent on what state (i.e. active or bypass) the pedal was in when this dip switch was changed.

Shape: Allows for either triangular / linear ramping (default) or square.

Buffer: This enables optional noise-less / click-less high-quality buffered bypass.

Sweep: This controls where ramp sweeps. In “T” (top), the expression control will occur between the current knob position and the max position (fully clockwise). In “B” (bottom) the expression control will occur between the current knob position and the minimum position (fully counterclockwise).

Basically, to make a long story even longer, the Generation Loss uses random pitch fluctuations, filters to cut down on the signal’s bandwidth, sample rate reduction, and noise to mimic that decreased sound quality and sound artifacts without the need for a broken VHS player. An absolute experimenter’s dream, there were only 1,000 of these Limited Edition pedals produced, for just one time only, so they are already sought-after and will surely become collector’s items down the road. Hopefully, everyone who does get their hands on one uses it to its full potential, because collaborations like this will change not only your rig and your sound, but how you approach writing and playing music overall. Cheers to Joel, Tom and the Chase Bliss Audio & Cooper FX crews for bringing the best of both worlds together for a once-in-a-lifetime kind of effect pedal – we’ve attempted to capture some of the sounds it makes in our demo below, please check it out and have a look/listen for yourself.

This is the sound of nostalgia.