YouTuber and musician Andrew Huang has teamed up with Swedish synthmaker Love Hultén on a one-of-a-kind effects machine.
“This is a custom effects processor that I commissioned from Love Hultén, who for years has been creating these amazing things,” says the producer. The result is a bespoke, self-contained rig combining several of Huang’s favourite effects, housed in a chassis that feels very much in the orbit of Teenage Engineering’s design language.
Dubbed the “Glitch Box” – though Huang has also playfully called it the “Refractor” or “Refraction Engine” – the unit brings together five pedals: the Empress Echosystem, Hologram Microcosm, Red Panda Tensor, Red Panda Raster V2 and Empress Reverb. Look closely and you can still spot the original pedals embedded within the chassis, revealing the chain at the heart of the design.
Explaining his rationale for commissioning the device, Huang says, “I’m someone who’s always combining my pedals in different ways and putting them in different orders and experimenting. So I never before would have considered immortalising a chain like this.”
“I can’t really take them out of here now, but I found this chain and I just really loved it for a lot of different use cases. And I figured if it was all in one place, self-contained, easy to move around, no mess of tons of cables, then I would just use it so much more.”
To make the unit more immediate and playable, the Glitch Box swaps traditional footswitches for tactile clicky buttons. Each effect has a yellow bypass button, while a larger arcade-style button acts as a kill switch.
Huang explains: “If I were using these pedals in their original format, [with] stomp switches, they’re built for feet. They take a little bit to hit them down. And here it’s just such a quick on and off with any of them.”
On the kill switch, he adds, “This switch cuts the sound, but it’s actually before the final reverb in the chain… and then with the reverb off the kill switch is also just great for little stutter effects.”
And instead of conventional VU meters, the Glitch Box features a ferrofluid visualiser that reacts dynamically to the audio output, adding to the whole sci-fi- aesthetic.
Check out the device in action below.
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