It’s a good time to be alive for audiophiles and effects pedal nerds. One operation in particular, Chase Bliss Audio out of Anoka, Minnesota, is redefining what a guitar pedal can be.

Every serious player has confronted the choice between analog and digital guitar pedals. Most tone snobs are wary of digital pedals, opting for the more natural sound of analog, but digital pedals provide convenience and control that analog just can’t offer. Chase Bliss has given musicians the versatility of digital with the soul of analog. The sheer range of sounds opens up vast possibilities for discovering new tones.

“A lot of companies create pedals to control the user experience,” says Joel Korte, who founded Chase Bliss Audio in 2013. “I do the opposite.”

Analog Heart

Eric Limer

At the heart of most guitarists’ pedalboards is dirt—boost, overdrive, fuzz—and the number of dirt pedals out there is practically endless. But the options can be overwhelming, and each pedal you add to your rig comes with compromise. Using multiple pedals degrades your overall signal, creating more cable length running from guitar to amp—and more room for something to go wrong. It’s difficult to figure out the proper pedal order. Screeching and unwanted muddiness can occur.

Appropriately, the company’s slogan is “digital brain, analog heart.”

With the Brothers pedal, you can swap out half your rig for one pedal and put an end to the madness. Chase Bliss pedals have a completely analog signal path, yet are controlled by digital microprocessors. Appropriately, the company’s slogan is “digital brain, analog heart.”

Korte has been building adventurous pedals for years, but with Brothers, he wanted to do something unprecedented. Designed in collaboration with Peter Bregman of Resonant Electronic Design, Brothers is built upon two analog channels, each containing distinct boost, overdrive, and fuzz circuits.

The upshot is that one analog pedal controls all three circuits in each channel, an incredible electrical engineering challenge. Korte wasn't interested in building a dirt until he took apart some of Bregman’s previous overdrive pedals and examined the circuit wizardry. An electrical artistry partnership was born.

Eric Limer

BUY NOW



The plethora of tones you can get from Brothers is pretty mind-blowing, and the controls are surprisingly intuitive. It comes with a learning curve that could be intimidating to novice pedal stompers, but I’ve never played an analog pedal with such a breadth of possible sounds, from a sparkling country boost to balls-to-the-wall fuzzed out chaos.

Six in One

To understand the versatility of Brothers, it’s important to take a step back and look at how the circuitry in the pedal compares to a simple, classic single circuit overdrive pedal. The Ibanez Tube Screamer, for example, is the most popular and cloned pedal circuit in the effects world.

It’s helpful to think of circuit components as a series of blocks. In essence a Tube Screamer is an input buffer block that connects to a clipping amp block, which generates the overdrive by limiting the voltage. The clipping amp block connects to a tone/volume block, and then finally to an output buffer.

In Brothers, however, three circuits share the same input and output buffer on each channel. Where the clipping amp block is on the Tube Screamer, Brothers has 3 blocks on each channel—one for boost, one for overdrive, and one for fuzz. The circuits can be stacked in parallel or in series for complex chains. Then each channel has its own tone block for versatile sculpting, which is handy when combining channel tones.

The result is a pedal with virtually endless tones to discover. Channel A contains Bregman’s JFET circuits and Channel B contains Korte’s integrated circuits that he created to complement Channel A. Each channel is controlled by separate gain and tone knobs, though the channels share a master volume control. Korte and Bregman tapered the knobs to accentuate sweet spots, and yet the dials can still go to extremes so they won’t leave you wanting more.

The drives on A and B are similar, but the three circuits on B are slightly more compressed (producing richer sustain) and have a bit more gain on tap. Channel A’s drive has more pronounced asymmetrical clipping, which gives it a more transparent tone.

Neither channel is overly compressed, though. (You’re not going to get the mid-hump of a Tubescreamer.) The circuits work to bring out the magic in your amp organically, rather than transforming your rig into something it’s not. The Boost on A breaks up into natural overdrive at lower volumes than the Boost on B, which has robust headroom. The headroom on B is ideal for bassists and guitarists who seek sparkling clean power, whereas the Boost on A is more geared to blues and old school rock n’ roll—the sound of overloading a tube amp.

The differences between the two fuzz circuits are more pronounced than the overdrives. The fuzz on channel A is smoother, more like a distortion, than the wild and hairy fuzz on B. And when you lower the gain or roll back the volume on your guitar, fuzz A is reminiscent of Hendrix’s classic sound. Channel B’s fuzz, loosely based on the rare 1977 Electro Harmonix Big Muff (which used op-amps instead of transistors and is a staple of The Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan,) can get pretty extreme. With the gain cranked, it has a girthy, full-bodied sound, perfect for sludgy metal and noise rock.

Crossing the Wires and Flipping the Switches

Individually, the two channels are nothing short of great, but the mad tonal sorcery of the Brothers pedal reveals itself when you combine channels. There’s a three-way toggle switch that comes into play when you blend channels, allowing you to route the channels in parallel or in series. With six circuits across two channels, the pedal yields 33 routing options.

Eric Limer

Then there’s a mix/stack (M/S) control. In parallel mode, this knob mixes the two channels for unique textures. For example, you can blend a clean boost on A with an uber saturated fuzz from B for a foreboding tone that retains clarity. Stacking the two channels in series, the knob acts like a volume/gain control between the two channels, controlling how hard channel A cascades into B or vice versa.

The versatility of the Brothers’ configuration is virtually endless. Stack the two overdrives A to B to get some hard-hitting punk rock tones, or stack the fuzz on A to a high gain overdrive on B to get more of thrash metal sound. Stacking A to B in general retains clarity and pick attack and is great for both rhythm and leads. Stack the fuzzes and crank the gains and you get a bone-crunching powerhouse.

If you stack the overdrives or fuzzes on B to A you can get synth-like leads and create an ambient wash perfect for post-rock and more experimental music. One of my favorite sounds is cascading a high gain fuzz on B into a low gain fuzz on A. This mangles your signal, creating a starved battery-like fuzz. I love the sputtery sound. Sometimes you just want the option to go ugly as well as pristine.

Then there are the DIP switches, which, I’ll admit, can be a bit intimidating at first. Korte sagely advises that guitarists experiment with the other controls before delving into the sixteen DIP switches located on the back of the pedal. But once you get a hang of the rest of the features, you would be remiss not to explore them.

Eric Limer

Sweeping the tone produces an oddly pleasing dubstep-like effect (when using fuzz), more so than the quacky traditional wah sound which I was expecting. By plugging in an expression pedal, you can control every parameter on the fly with your foot. You can sweep the M/S switch in parallel and by setting one channel to boost and the other to fuzz, allowing you to go from a clean boost to hell-fire distortion, and blend anywhere in between by rocking your foot back and forth. Also you can set either channel to momentary bypass for some trippy manual tremolo/kill-switch effects. This is just scratching the surface. You can get real whacky with DIP switch combinations.

Digital Brain

Brothers, like all Chase Bliss pedals, has digital microprocessors to allow the storing of presets. Inside the pedal, LEDs controlled by microprocessors shine on resistive elements. You control the brightness of the LEDs and resistance through your knob settings. However there is no interaction directly between the processors and the analog circuitry. So paradoxically, Chase Bliss pedals are 100 percent analog and yet digitally controlled.

If there is any drawback to the intricacy of the pedal, it’s that there are six circuits but only one volume control. Although the knob is tapered to work appropriately with each circuit, the volume output on each circuit is not the same. For example, with the volume and gain knobs at the same positions, the overdrive on B is a bit louder than the overdrive on A.

While the volume differences between circuits require knob tweaking, this is where the pedal’s digital technology really comes in handy. You can store two onboard preset tones in addition to playing the pedal on live mode, but I’d recommend getting the ($79) to store six presets, or if you feel ambitious get a Midi controller where you can store a whopping 122 presets. Saving and recalling presets on Faves is a cinch. Make sure all your presets are at the proper volume and you are gig ready.

Eric Limer

Convenience with incredible sound: this is tonal bliss. Before Brothers, I’d never played or heard a dirt pedal that could yield so many great sounds—nothing came close. Brothers is a tinkerer’s dream. It forces you to think and beckons creativity.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to say Brothers can give you every dirt sound you could possibly desire, but every time I plug it in I discover new sounds. If you get familiar with this pedal, it can replace multiple other pedals that take up valuable real estate on the pedalboard, and it will save some of the headache of making pedals play nice with each other.

Brothers is practical, ridiculously versatile, and a beast all of its own. It satiates the desire for time-tested tones while guiding players to unchartered territories. Korte is constantly tweaking his creations and building new pedals that defy traditional classification—and I can’t wait to see what he crams into a box next.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io