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 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 out.
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. In Live mode, the X switch expands the memory to 30 seconds or 60 seconds and lowers the fidelity.
But then there’s the 10th voice: the few-millisecond-to-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 now the length of memory and playback speed. 2x gives you 20 seconds of memory at half speed and 4x gives you 40 seconds of memory at 1/4 speed.
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. But 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.
Dealbreakers
These are here to discourage those who will fail to embrace a pedal. (You know, the people on Reddit who have a complaint about every pedal, but don’t even own the pedal.)
- Mono.
- No presents. It’s designed for live experimentation.
- Minimal controls. So if you 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.
While the loops and delay are ingeniously simple in concept and the knobs will quickly make sense, you can get an amazing array of sounds out of this box.
- 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.
- It’s very cool to put a freeze pedal before Phantom Limb to create a wall of drone. The freeze will build into harmony as all nine microloopers sustain it.
- 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 can be some unexplainable added noise that’s not in each pedal individually. But then it 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.
Yep, the detractors will accuse Discomfort Designs Phantom Limb of being another bleep-bloop pedal. And in ways I guess it can be that if you want it to. But where it really excels in taking a single note or chord and expounding on it in harmonious ways. The beauty of this pedal is that you can find a setting you like and never monkey with it: just let it create soup. I find myself fairly content with a short delay and cranking the Length and Chance knobs. Since so much is left to chance, you’ll never get the same performance twice.
Locking the loop to create pads and repeating loops is another realm. Using the Length and Chance knobs to fine tune the rhythm of the loop can be challenging. The tip here is to remember you’ll be snagging something from the past when you hold down and lock the Loop footswitch. The X toggle is great fun in this mode.
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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