wolfe with an e's blog
Current obsession: Discomfort Designs Phantom Limb pedal.
It’s super looper soup.
What’s Phantom Limb? The tl;dr: version: An always-recording, 15-60 second memory loop that feeds a menagerie of nine, randomly-triggered, harmoniously-pitched, forward-and-reverse microloopers that then feeds into a long delay. The result? You play a riff and incidental cinematic music comes back at you.
A strange brew of random and regimented.
Phantom Limb is somewhat of a musical oxymoron of randomness and structure. The only controls you have over the random loops are the Length knob that controls playback length of the microloops from 10ms to 5 sec (things will get glitchy on the morning side of the dial) and the Chance knob that determines how often any of the nine microloops fire (at 7a almost never, at 5p almost a steady stream). Playing into Phantom Limb is like a duet with Rainman. I think the closest approximation is Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ Bloom app: expounding on what you play in unpredictably musical ways.
But then there’s the 10th voice: the 2-second delay side that’s completely predictable. You have the conventional delay controls through the Time knob and the Regen knob. The left toggle controls whether the delay is clean, overly-modulated (useful for creating an unstable chorus or phaser) or pitched up an escalating octave. The delay can add some defined rhythm to the loops or be used solo as a normal delay for your dry. There seems to be some amount of synchrony when setting the Time knob to about 10a where the delay is about a second long so it somewhat syncs with the 1-second trigger mechanism of the microloops. Or if you crank the Time knob and set the Type toggle to Pitch, it adds to the harmonic mayhem.
Footswitches.
Phantom Limb’s knobs have no secondary functions (gotta love that) but the footswitches do. Holding the left footswitch clears the loop. Holding the right locks the loop to play 2/3 of it. When locked, the Length knob controls how much of the frozen loop is played. The Chance knob now scrubs through the memory to determine which part of it is played. The X switch controls the 15-second length of record memory (or 10-seconds when locked by doubling or quadrupling it). The longer the memory, the lower the fidelity.
Is this the Chase Bliss Habit Lite?
There are many comparisons out there since the control layout is similar to a Chase Bliss pedal and the returning memory and quirky delay have similarities to Habit. While they function similarly, they can sound drastically different. Phantom Limb is also a simpler pedal to operate with key parameters fixed (like the delay/loop blend) or randomly controlled (like the nine microloopers). At $100 less than Habit, Phantom Limb will find a different audience that prefers not constantly fiddling with knobs and will just let the pitched microloopers do their thing. I find myself fairly content with a short delay and cranking the Length and Chance knobs. (But when I lock the loop, I can’t resist slowing it down to x2 to lower the pitch and speed of the 10sec memory and crafting loops to play over. You can create some unique drones.)
Dealbreakers
These are here to discourage those who fail to embrace a pedal. (You know, the people on Reddit who have a complaint about every pedal, but don’t even have the pedal.)
- Mono.
- No presents. It’s designed for live experimentation.
- Minimal controls. The microloops are left up to randomness. So if you don’t want to remove the two fifths loopers from the mix or want to tone down the modulation: sorry.
- No mix control for balancing the loops and delay. They’re set reasonably well.
- No MIDI. That’s always a complaint, but do those people even use MIDI?
- No Expression control.
None of these are turnoffs to me.
Tips.
- Phantom Limb is a surprisingly quiet pedal. If you’re hearing anything that resembles noise at all from this thing, it’s likely you’re using the delay in Pitch mode with the Regen knob cranked. At this setting, the delay escalates an octave each pass and eventually the artifacts at the upper end of the frequency spectrum can sound like a garbled hiss. The solution is to back off the Regen to about 12n. When the Time knob is set short, this will give you a manageable shimmer delay.
- You can mimic the wonderful Fairfield Shallow Water pedal submersible sound: Set the delay short, the Modulation switch on, the Regen knob cranked and the Filter to Low Pass.
- If you want loops to sound more glitchy: Keep the Length knob low and the Chance knob set high.
- The delay can give you that pre-vinyl, Victrola sound with the Modulation switch on and the Filter set to Bandpass.
- My only gripe about the mix of the microloopers is that the two sub-octave voices could be a little louder, since five of the loopers are above normal pitch. Using the low-pass filter helps to tone down those higher-pitches, but adding a pedal with a lower octave really fills out the spectrum. I like something that can stagger that lower octave for more personality, like the OBNE BL-44 Reverse. Bizarrely, when the BL-44’s clock slider is below about ⅔ there’s some unexplainable added noise that’s not in each pedal individually. But then it kinda adds to the lo-fi vibe.
- When using the delay for chorussy/phasey stuff, an ambient reverb following Phantom Limb works well, like the ZCat Big.
- In Modulated Delay mode with the Regen knob cranked, the vibrato gets stronger each repeat.
- Learn both sides of the pedal independently. Understanding what the delay or looper is doing is helpful in grasping what happens when they’re used together.
My take.
Since so much is left to chance, you’ll never get the same performance twice out of the Discomfort Designs Phantom Limb. More control over parameters would be nice but, I appreciate that the layout is so simple. The beauty of this pedal is that you can find a setting you like and never monkey with it: just let it create soup. The two halves of this pedal really do complete each other. With its competent delay and unpredictable microloopers, ambient players may find that Phantom Limb fills many needs while taking up minimal pedalboard real estate.
For the spectators: Daisy processor, Mono, not true bypass.
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