Gamechanger Audio Plasma Pedal

When Gamechanger Audio released that pedal, I needed to try it out. That kind of marketing is right up my alley. Not only do you play a literal bolt of lightning, but this bolt is seated in a glass rod so you can watch it while you make noise. Awesome.

On top of that, you get a powerful 2 band EQ (bass and treble | boost and cut) and a blend knob to get some clean signal back in. Furthermore, you can decide if you want the EQ applied to the wet side only or the combined wet and dry signal. Can you say wet signal when it’s made through a bolt of plasma? I guess those three thousand five hundred volts don’t really like moisture.

My first thought after playing a few notes was “That Gamechanger Audio Plasma pedal better has a steep learning curve“.
I love how it looks and could spend ages watching that plasma tube while I play. The idea of having a powerful 2 band EQ (massive boost and cut) that can be applied either to the wet signal only or to both clean and wet is appealing, but after playing it for about ten minutes, I absolutely hated it.
A certain learning curve applied, and it got better, but I wanna say it went from ‘hate’ to ‘strong dislike’.

It’s either too artificial sounding or it is too gated or both. Even with the clean signal blended in, it feels weird playing at low voltages. You can’t let notes ring out where the drive gradually fades away. That plasma tube either has enough yallah to fry a chicken in flight, or it’s not passing signal at all. It’s full on and suddenly the gate snaps shut, no decay on the note. The separation between the clean signal and the plasma signal is quite evident at all times, and it’s hard to balance an acceptable mix.
This might be a fun pedal if you’re running experimental synth sounds, but it has a rather erratic and hard to predict behavior and I do struggle finding a useful application for it.