Lichtlaerm Audio Nostalgia Chorus Vibrato Ring Modulator

Modulation pedals can instantly inject some sparkle into even the most dull or incomplete riff, chord progression or musical idea. Today’s pedal, the Lichtlaerm Audio Nostalgia, features aspects of Chorus, Vibrato, Double Tracking, Ring Modulation and more. Never a boring moment with this one, lets dive in and check out this brand new, innovative modulated machine, shall we?

The Nostalgia is a very complex pedal that can do a lot of different things: lush choruses, vibrato, double tracking, vinyl & other LoFi-Sounds, crazy pitch bendy stuff all the way up to ring modulation and more! The waveforms are rather self explanatory with Triangle and Sine wave shapes giving you traditional Chorus & Vibrato sounds, and the Random Slopes wave shape also works great for a very natural modulation. RPM is the rate of the LFO and ranges from 0.05Hz to 25Hz (20 seconds to 40 milliseconds) which is huge range! Depth sets the swing of the LFO-control voltage and defines how much the delay of the chorus is modulated – it is very linear but offers approximately 30% more swing than usual chorus-LFOs.

The Depth control works in tandem with the Warp control, which defines the actual length of the delay time: you’ll get traditional sounds up to around 12 o’clock (depending on the LFO-settings) and crazy sounds past 12 o’clock. As always, Lichtlaerm Audio opted for giving far more control than is needed: past 12 o’clock, the Warp control drives the delay chip a bit outside its recommended parameters, causing nice LoFi-artifacts and a pleasant noise floor, so everything past noon is already meant for ambient / LoFi / disintegration-loop sounds. You can further push it into LoFi territory by rolling back the Fidelity knob – the circuit splits the signal into two different paths at the end: one with high quality parts, the other one with misbiased transistors and overall the worst parts available resulting in a very LoFi, grainy sound. You can blend between those two with the Fidelity control, which gives you very HiFi and clean sounds clockwise and LoFi vinyl / telephone / grammophone style sounds CCW.

Any setting can be turned into a LoFi-variant by rolling back the Fidelity knob, too. There’s a lot to explore and that’s half the fun of pedals anyway, right? We’re honored to be a part of the Lichtlaerm Audio release of the Nostalgia today – in the demo below, we run through all the controls, discover some wild and wacko sounds and have a great time doing it all. Be sure to subscribe when you’re over on our YouTube channel, and be sure to visit the Lichtlaerm website to grab one of these for yourself…cheers!!