NPD: Chase Bliss Audio Gravitas and Faves

[Sid Nitzerglobin]

Got this one in for the board I'm assembling for my FilterTron equipped guitars. CME got these to me really fast for standard free shipping. Ordered these around 1PM yesterday and they were delivered by UPS ground at ~ 10AM today.

The Gravitas seems like it will sound pretty amazing and seems like the most flexible and novel combination of features I've seen for a tremolo. Judging from the demos and knowing my love of trem I think it's got the potential to give me just as many hours of tone tweaking bliss as the BigSky or Timeline. It seems like a pretty damn complex pedal, but the control array and layout seem like they could feel pretty natural to me for sonic exploration based on the demos. Adding the Faves switch seems like it should hopefully make it pretty easy to use more than a couple of sounds on it for me too in actual performance settings.

I won't have a chance to start diving into them until this evening but I figured I'd post some unboxing pics:



I'll post some impressions once I've given them a proper spin around the block.

In the meantime, these were the demos that had me pretty much sold on this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRoWi-p25EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QphynPG1LLQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BdVr3MOqm4

[CHILDISHGAMBINO]

Chase Bliss stuff is so neat. So expensive too. I get why but with the crappy USD to CAD exchange right now they're outside of my budget. For pedals anyway. How does it sound now that you've had it for a bit?

[Sid Nitzerglobin]

Chase Bliss stuff is so neat. So expensive too. I get why but with the crappy USD to CAD exchange right now they're outside of my budget. For pedals anyway. How does it sound now that you've had it for a bit?

I've been crazy busy so still haven't got to dive into it as deeply as it deserves but so far I'm really liking it. I'm hoping to be able to spend a good couple days screwing around w/ it somewhat exclusively over the holidays and really learning the myriad of switches, which knob does what when each switch is flipped, and diving into the Faves and getting some cool presets built. I'll try to report back again when I feel like I'm actually proficient w/ it but here's the impression to date:

So far w/o touching the dip switches and pretty much just "using the force" to guide my knob/switch twiddling there's a whole bunch of widely varied sounds in there. Seems like the general timbre is universally fairly warm and earthy, might be a turn off if you're looking for super hifi/bright sounding trem but I really like it personally. I'm also really liking the waveform controls, they seem to open up a whole lot of control and feel very intuitive to use, much more so than other trem pedals I've tried w/ similar capabilities. Even w/o mastery of the pedal I've been able to dial in a pretty impressive array of sounds, alot of them well outside the bounds of what I would expect from a trem pedal (somehow I got it into a really great psuedo reverse swell setting), that I've really enjoyed playing w/. It feels like one of those pedals that will continue to inspire me to play w/ it in new and different ways while covering more traditional amp style trem sounds beautifully.

It's a little pricey even in USD, but it's feeling like it's actually a pretty decent value when you consider the capabilities and apparent quality. Joel seems to approach his business in a way that I feel really good about supporting as well.