Lately I can't stop thinking about the brand of Chase Bliss Audio
To explain it for a non-musician audience Chase Bliss makes expensive guitar effect pedals, but I want to share why their brand is interesting.
There are so many effect pedals in the marketplace and only so many effects, which is why Chase Bliss' elegant combinations go to unlikely places.
Let me mention a few of their products to give you a sense of the flavour here.
In particular some of their pedals have a glitchy approach to looping and this adds variations as the playback repeats.
An early example is the Blooper, a looping effect that can modify the phrases in a musical way with each echo.
This is something that I ponder in my creative practises, ways of repeating a process and yet engaging a kind of spark for inspiration.
One approach is the Cut-up technique, where you add a randomisation to the material, for example.
Since tape is renowned for giving excitement to transients, I bought this pedal to hear how it sounded with my drum machines.
Even though it was mimicking tape, I liked the effect and began looking further.
The pedal Lossy had just been released, which takes inspiration from the sound of dial-up modems and mp3-style bitrate compression effects.
I wondered why anyone would want their guitar to sound like 1990s' era internet, but was intrigued.
Both Generation Loss and Lossy were collaborations Chase Bliss developed with other companies, which is another interesting aspect to their brand.
In the case of Lossy, it was originally a computer-based DAW effect and it's still less common for a software to become a hardware (rather than all the software emulations of hardware, which is a massive trend since DAWs first became a thing).
It was a pedal mimicking a plug-in and, as unusual as the thing sounded, I often used the pedal and ended up buying the software too.
(The collaborative approach is interesting too, since another trend among the corporations that own the biggest music brands is to own all of the intellectual property in a product and use profit to drive their development.)
(That's a pun, because I started a habit with Habit. Anyway.)
Hilowitz described their Habit effect as a "happy accident machine" in the way it reimagines a delay as a kind of collector that serves snippets back to you.
He asks if one can be made nostalgic for a thing that happened seconds earlier.
I like using Habit to create parts that I improvise over and it sometimes comes close to mimicking the fun of jam with someone, but in this case it was an earlier me.
It's a kind of collaboration with enough of a sense of surprise created with the randomisation-effect that's often under the "modify" knob.
My partner thinks the design of Habit looks like the game Operation, which it does but it also looks right at home with the rounded-corners designs of Chase Bliss manuals.
There's a definite visual sense of the nostalgia that Hilowitz has noted.
One last pedal I like is called Brothers, which is a straight-forward effect that manipulates gain for volume and distortion through two channels.
Even though it's a simple pre-amp, the two channels offer a variety of possibilities and I haven't explored the presets or MIDI capabilities yet.
The pedals I've mentioned, names like Brothers and Generation Loss, resonate with a poignancy when you learn about the Chase Bliss story.
Founder Joel Korte has said in an interview:
“The reason I started learning about electrical engineering in college was because I was interested in designing audio products. At some point that dream and passion faded and evolved into something more practical. I just wanted to get a job. In February of 2007, just a few months before graduation, my life changed forever when my brother, Chase Korte, was killed by a drunk driver. He was living and working in LA, pursuing his dream of becoming an actor. One of my brother’s guiding principles was a phrase known by philosopher Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss.” When I started the company, I thought “Chase Bliss” would be a good name because it incorporated my brother’s values as well as his name. After my brother died it took about a year before I could really function normally as a person, but when that happened I decided I needed to follow my own bliss and that is around the time I got a job with ZVEX.”
ZVEX, for those who don't know, is another pedal company and one that collaborated with Chase Bliss, I might add.
Another aspect is that, when you watch their videos, you can observe how much success Joel has had with speech therapy.
It's remarkable how he has overcome a stutter and kinda fascinating that his own error-prone communication is a feature of the Chase Bliss marketing while a similar effect is part of many of their effect pedals.
So now I expect you can see why the company has been on my mind, because their products are full of surprises and give me a nostalgic vibe.
In particular it's this deeper sentimental kinda tone under the bright colours that brings a richness to the experience.
The Mystery Box is an expression of so much that interests me about Chase Bliss, I think.
It's kinda like a pass-the-parcel, particularly when you watch the unboxing videos that people have been posting.
I like that Chase Bliss effects sometimes bring spontaneity through a chance-like process that reminds me of playing with someone close.
Which is why I wonder if the palpable sense of nostalgia in their products is a craving for a shared childhood, because it brings an emotional depth to their sense of fun by tempering it with other emotions.
And here I end with another quote from Joel:
“I think there’s something about the way a pedal makes you feel that can never be emulated or replicated.”