EarthQuaker Devices Rainbow Machine: The Pedal With A Knob Called Magic

Every pedal company eventually builds one product that is impossible to defend on paper. EarthQuaker Devices built theirs in 2011 and then had the nerve to put a control on it labelled Magic, which the manual describes, more or less accurately, as doing “a bunch of other stuff no one understands.”

The Rainbow Machine is a polyphonic pitch shifter that EarthQuaker themselves market with a warning label. Their own product copy opens by telling you who should not buy it: “This one is for experimenters, adventurists, and noisemakers. Totally not for purists and/or tone hounds. There are no ‘natural sounds’ that come from this box.” That is not marketing bravado dressed up as humility. It is a genuinely accurate description of a device that will take a clean chord and hand you back something that sounds like a broken tape machine falling down a stairwell in a cathedral.

And yet Troy Van Leeuwen has one on his Queens of the Stone Age board. So does Paramore’s Taylor York. Lee Ranaldo keeps one in his studio. PJ Harvey used one on I Inside the Old Year Dying. Noel Gallagher had one in the room for Who Built The Moon?. Thom Yorke has one on The Smile’s vocal board. Steve Albini — a man whose entire recorded aesthetic was built on the proposition that effects are usually a mistake — held one up on camera for EarthQuaker’s own YouTube channel.

The gap between “this pedal is unusable” and “this pedal is on the boards of half the interesting guitarists of the last fifteen years” is the whole story here. This is a feature, not a review. We are not scoring it. What follows is where the Rainbow Machine came from, exactly what its six knobs and two footswitches actually do, which players have genuinely been documented using it and which claims are softer than they look, eight settings worth stealing, and an honest account of who should walk away.

The Black Sheep Of Akron

The EarthQuaker story — Jamie Stillman, a former Black Keys road manager, building fuzz boxes by hand in an Akron, Ohio basement and turning it into one of the most consequential American pedal companies of the twenty-first century — has been told in full in our piece on the EarthQuaker Devices Hoof, and we will not repeat it here. What matters for the Rainbow Machine is where it sits in that story: right at the moment EarthQuaker stopped being a fuzz company.

By 2011 the catalogue was mostly analogue dirt. The Hoof, the Acapulco Gold, the Tone Reaper. Then the Rainbow Machine arrived, running digital signal processing, doing something no fuzz pedal could approximate, and looking like a bag of Refreshers. Effects Database logs the product entry on 23 November 2011; the first demo video in its index is a ProGuitarShop clip dated 24 November 2011, with Premier Guitar filming a NAMM ’12 demo alongside the Organizer and Tone Job in February 2012. Charles Saufley’s Premier Guitar review ran on 10 August 2012 at a $225 street price.

EarthQuaker’s own 2019 retrospective describes it more vaguely — “since entering our world at the end of the first decade of this century” — which is a slightly generous rounding of a pedal that shipped in the eleventh year of it. We mention this only because it is a useful reminder that manufacturers are often the least precise source on their own chronology, and the video record is usually tighter than the prose.

Aaron Rogers, an EQD circuit builder who wrote the company’s bass column, called it “the black sheep of the EarthQuaker Devices family… the wizard in the cupboard under the stairs,” and noted that the pedal “has fascinated (and infuriated) guitarists since its release and been called everything from a one-trick pony to the greatest effects pedal ever made.” That is EarthQuaker, on their own website, publishing the criticism of their own product. It remains one of the more disarming things a pedal company has ever done.

Charles Saufley’s framing in Premier Guitar is worth keeping in your head as you read on: the Rainbow Machine “is not the kind of pedal you’re likely to dial-in right out of the box. Some controls get more extreme on either side of high noon, others increase in intensity as you sweep clockwise, while others work in the opposite direction.” He gave it four and a half picks for tones and three out of five for ease of use, which is one of the more honest ratings splits Premier Guitar has printed.

What It Actually Does To Your Signal

Strip away the pixie dust and the Rainbow Machine is a specific, describable architecture. Understanding it is the difference between a pedal you use and a pedal you sell.

Your input signal goes into a polyphonic pitch shifter — polyphonic meaning it tracks chords, not just single notes, which in 2011 was still a genuinely difficult thing to do at a boutique price point. That shifter calculates a harmony anywhere from a perfect fourth below your input to a major third above it. Crucially, it does not snap to musical intervals. Every atonal microtonal pitch in between is available, and most of the knob’s travel lands there.

That harmony is then fed into a second pitch shifter, which generates an octave of the first harmony. The direction depends on where the Pitch knob is: above noon, Secondary adds an octave up; below noon, an octave down. Set Pitch to exactly noon and Secondary stops being an octave at all and becomes a third chorus voice, which is how you get the triple-tracked sound EQD themselves recommend as the starting point.

Both voices then hit a Tone filter and a Tracking control that sets the lag between dry and wet. And then the whole assembly can be fed back into itself with Magic, which is a regeneration control across both pitch shifters simultaneously. Because each pass through the shifter moves the pitch again, feedback does not produce repeats at a fixed pitch the way a delay does — it produces repeats that climb or fall in pitch with every regeneration. That is the “pixie trails” sound, and it is the pedal’s signature.

The single most useful thing EarthQuaker print about the pedal is this: “The pitch warping behavior is entirely dependent upon the Pitch knob’s position relative to noon. Set above noon, echoes, pixie trails, and other effects will ascend in pitch as they sustain. With the Pitch control below noon, any lingering effects will descend.” If you only remember one operational fact, remember that one. Above noon the world floats away upward. Below noon it sinks.

Specifications

V1 Versus V2: What Changed In 2018

EarthQuaker announced the Rainbow Machine V2 at NAMM 2018, on 10 January, as part of a five-pedal V2 batch alongside the Avalanche Run, the Spatial Delivery, the Hoof Reaper and The Depths. That same announcement introduced the Westwood as a brand-new product, which makes January 2018 one of the busiest single days in the company’s history.

MusicRadar’s Michael Astley-Brown reported the changes at the time, and EarthQuaker’s press release listed them explicitly. The V2 is:

• Twice as loud as the original. This is the single biggest practical difference. V1 owners routinely complained about output level when the effect was blended heavily.
• Improved signal-to-noise ratio. The V1’s DSP floor was audible on quiet passages.
• Extended delay time on the Tracking control, which meant longer, more ambient lags rather than just short doubling.
• Deeper chorus tones at the noon setting.
• Flexi-Switch on both footswitches. Both Activate and Magic gained silent, relay-based soft switching with simultaneous momentary and latching operation.
• “More Magic” — EQD’s own phrasing, but owners report a genuinely wider range on the knob rather than just a rescaled taper.
• Knob layout changed. Owners on r/guitarpedals note that the V2 places Primary on the left and Secondary on the right, and that the V2 allows the secondary pitch voice to be used more independently than the original did. This is the fastest way to identify a V2 from a photograph.

The Flexi-Switch on the Magic footswitch is the change that matters most musically, and it is worth explaining properly. With the Rainbow Machine engaged, you can hold the Magic switch down, get chaotic for exactly as long as you hold it, and let go to drop straight back into your normal sound. Or you can tap it and leave it latched. That single feature converts Magic from a set-and-forget parameter into a performance gesture — one that a lot of players use as a kind of tone grenade at the end of a phrase.

The Controls, One By One

Pitch

The most important knob on the pedal, and the one that governs everything else. Fully counter-clockwise gives you a fourth below your fundamental. Fully clockwise gives you a third above. Noon is unison. Everything between those landmarks is deliberately, unrepentantly out of tune — Saufley described the in-between zone as yielding “a world of dissonant harmonies that can vary from mellow to monstrous and demented,” which is fair. When the pedal gets away from you, returning Pitch to noon is the reset. This is also the parameter routed to the expression jack.

Primary

The level of the first pitch-shifted voice. This is a volume control, not a mix control — an important distinction, because the Rainbow Machine has no blend knob and no way to kill the dry signal. Your dry tone is always there underneath. That is a limitation if you want fully wet studio sends and a mercy if you want to stay in a band.

Secondary

The level of the octave voice derived from the primary harmony. Up when Pitch is above noon, down when Pitch is below. At Pitch-noon it becomes a third chorus voice instead. EQD’s own copy suggests using it “to blend in faux-shimmer sounds or a low-frequency rumble,” and both of those descriptions are literal rather than poetic. Small amounts of Secondary with Pitch above noon is the closest the pedal gets to a conventional shimmer reverb without a reverb in the chain.

Tracking

The lag time between your dry signal and the processed voices. Turn it up for tighter tracking and shorter delay; turn it down for longer lags and more ambience. EQD are explicit that tracking accuracy genuinely improves as this control is increased, so it is not purely a time control — it is a time-versus-accuracy trade-off, which is unusual and worth knowing. Wound down, it produces the polyrhythmic tone clusters that make the pedal sound like an Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man that has developed opinions.

Tone

Here is a documented contradiction worth naming rather than papering over. EarthQuaker’s current product page states plainly: “Tone rolls off some treble for a darker, ‘vintage’ sound. Clockwise Tone settings are bright, counterclockwise is dark.” But EarthQuaker’s own 2016 blog article, written by an EQD circuit builder, says: “The ‘Tone’ control rolls off top end as you turn it up.” Those two statements are opposites. We have not been able to resolve which applies to which version, and we are not going to guess — the honest answer for a prospective buyer is that Tone’s direction may differ between V1 and V2, and you should sweep it and listen rather than trusting either document. Whichever way round it runs on your unit, it is one of the two or three keys to how radical or subtle the pedal sounds in a mix.

Magic

The regeneration control across both pitch shifters, with its own footswitch. Low settings buy you a couple of extra repeats out of whatever you already have dialled in. As you raise it you pass through, in EQD’s own ordering: increased ambience, resonant edge-of-oscillation pitch-shifting delays, chorus, metallic digital flanging, ascending or descending pixie trails, controllable self-oscillation, squalls of synthetic noise, whale song, and then distortion.

That list reads like a joke and is not one. Each of those is a real, findable zone on the knob. The reason Magic has its own footswitch is that almost none of those zones are places you want to live for a whole song, and almost all of them are places you want to visit for two bars.

Famous Players: What Holds Up

The Rainbow Machine has an unusually well-documented user list because EarthQuaker filmed most of it themselves. We have sorted the evidence by strength rather than by fame.

Tier one: on camera, in EarthQuaker’s own films, with quotes

Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age) is the closest thing the pedal has to a headline endorsement, and he gave the best available one-line summary of it in EQD’s April 2019 retrospective: “It just does that THING that nothing else kinda does.” He walked through his multi-amp rig with a Rainbow Machine on it in Board To Death Ep. 8, filmed 2 November 2017, alongside a Bit Commander and a Tentacle. Equipboard independently corroborates it with a pedalboard shot from a separate video. For the wider Queens context, our Josh Homme gear guide covers the other half of that guitar partnership.

Taylor York (Paramore) appeared in Board To Death Ep. 12 on 3 January 2018 with a Rainbow Machine, a Tone Job, a Terminal, a Dirt Transmitter and a Grand Orbiter, and told EQD that pedals “inspire me to do things differently. It’s such a big part of what I do and how I create.” Paramore’s own social account had already posted a photo of the pedal captioned “You can’t even imagine the sounds #rainbowmachine.” York also appears in the 2019 retrospective film. This is about as thoroughly nailed down as a gear attribution gets.

Sarah Lipstate (Noveller) is the artist whose work makes the strongest case for what the pedal is actually for. EarthQuaker filmed an EarthQuaker Session with her — “Deep Shelter,” published 11 September 2017 — with the Rainbow Machine tagged alongside the Pitch Bay, Levitation and the Avalanche Run, and ran a long interview with her in February 2017 that lists the same pedal among her core tools. Lipstate builds orchestral, non-guitar-sounding compositions out of guitar; a device that generates atonal harmony above and below what you play is a compositional instrument in that context rather than an effect.

Brendan Ekstrom (Circa Survive) was the very first Board To Death episode, filmed at the Agora Theater in Cleveland on 3 April 2017, and the Rainbow Machine is one of only four things tagged on the entire post. EQD chose to launch their flagship gear series with this pedal on the board.

Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan (SQÜRL) took Board To Death Ep. 13 on 1 February 2018 with a Rainbow Machine sitting next to an Avalanche Run, a Dispatch Master and a Transmisser. The film director’s drone-Western soundtrack work is exactly the application the pedal’s ascending-trails behaviour was built for.

Steve Albini appears with the pedal in hand in Show Us Your Junk! Ep. 23, published 22 March 2019. It is worth pausing on: the man who spent forty years arguing that the job is to record what happened in the room, holding an EarthQuaker pitch mangler on camera.

Toshi Kasai (Melvins, Big Business, and an engineer with platinum records from Foo Fighters and Tool sessions on his studio wall) walked through his gear in Show Us Your Junk! Ep. 11 on 28 June 2018 with the Rainbow Machine listed among the Organizer, Arpanoid, Bit Commander and Disaster Transport SR. John Vanderslice did the same for his Tiny Telephone studio in Ep. 10, 28 February 2018 — the studio where Death Cab, Spoon, Sleater-Kinney and St. Vincent records were made.

Low recorded an EarthQuaker Session on 4 March 2019 playing material from Double Negative, the record that turned one of American indie’s gentlest bands into a distortion-mangled art project. The Rainbow Machine is one of only three pedals tagged on the post, alongside the Afterneath and Avalanche Run.

CHON‘s Mario Camarena and Erick Hansel discussed the Rainbow Machine in an EQD interview published 27 April 2017, in the context of the San Diego math-rock band using effects pedals seriously for the first time in an eight-year career. Josh Merry (Sweet Spirit) took Board To Death Ep. 26 on 22 October 2019 with one. Justin Pearson and Joey Karam (the Locust, Dead Cross) had one in Ep. 16 on 2 August 2018 — Pearson’s assessment of the EQD aesthetic, “it’s not musical and I like that,” could serve as the Rainbow Machine’s tagline. Ilan Rubin (Nine Inch Nails, the New Regime) named it in an April 2020 EQD interview. RYAT used one on Fender Rhodes in a November 2017 EarthQuaker Session — with, per EQD’s own description, all knobs set to noon, purely as “a tasteful double tracking effect,” which is the best single argument that this pedal has a civilised setting.

Juan Alderete (the Mars Volta, Racer X) starred in an EQD-produced video, “EarthQuaker Devices & Juan Alderete Present: Rainbow Machine on Bass,” dated 11 August 2014, and appears again in the 2019 retrospective. Nick Reinhart (Tera Melos) demoed it on Alderete’s Pedals and Effects channel in January 2014 and is also in the retrospective. Kurt Ballou (Converge, GodCity) kicked off EarthQuaker’s “Over the Rainbow” challenge in November 2016 by recording “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” through one, which is a joke with a real pedal demonstration inside it.

The retrospective’s own credits list is the most efficient summary of the pedal’s constituency: alongside Stillman, it features Troy Van Leeuwen, Sarah Lipstate, Sadie Dupuis (Speedy Ortiz), Juan Alderete, Nick Reinhart, Norm Block, Taylor York, Yvette Young (Covet), Josh Martin (Little Tybee), Lisa Bella Donna, and two working producers — Vance Powell and Rob Schnapf. Dupuis’s line from the film is the most useful of the three EQD chose to pull: “It’s just such a distinct sound but it’s cool that it has so many applications.” And EQD engineer Jeff France, who fronts the “Song Exploder” episode about the pedal, offers the counter-argument to its reputation directly: “It’s not a one trick pony. It’s the exact opposite of a one trick pony.”

Tier two: strong photographic or first-party evidence, not filmed by EQD

Thom Yorke is a confirmed user, and this is worth flagging because we recently had to debunk a Thom Yorke attribution on the Afterneath, where the pedal turned out to be a Eurorack module in a front-of-house rack rather than anything on his board. The Rainbow Machine is the opposite case. The Radiohead and Smile rig archive The King of Gear documents it on both Yorke’s guitar board and The Smile’s vocal pedalboard: it appears in rehearsal footage in bursts alongside a Boss RE-20, it is credited with the heavy sweeping modulation on “You Will Never Work In Television Again,” and it is used on vocals during “Thin Thing.” Equipboard’s photo from The Smile’s livestream corroborates it. Two independent sources, multiple songs, two different signal chains — this one holds. Our Jonny Greenwood gear guide and Ed O’Brien gear guide cover the rest of that band’s very deep pedal habit.

PJ Harvey has both a 2022 studio photograph showing the pedal on her board and an album credit: Equipboard lists the Rainbow Machine as heard on I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023). Given how spare and unsettled that record’s guitar textures are, it fits.

Lee Ranaldo was photographed with one during a tour of his Hoboken studio, Echo Canyon West. For a Sonic Youth guitarist, a pedal that generates deliberately atonal harmony is less a novelty than a natural extension of the tuning philosophy — see also our Thurston Moore gear guide and the Lee Ranaldo gear guide.

Devin Townsend gave MusicRadar a direct, quotable account of how he uses it: “I’ve got the TC delay prior to it as well, so basically, they feed into each other. You kick this Rainbow Machine on and it does random things. There’s something to be said about it that I really dig, for that element of surprise.” That is a first-person description of a specific signal-chain placement, which puts it well above photo-based attribution. More on his rig in the Devin Townsend gear guide.

Omar Rodríguez-López discusses the pedal in a filmed pedalboard walkthrough. (A note on sourcing: Equipboard files him under At the Drive-In, which is accurate but incomplete — the Rainbow Machine sits far more naturally in the Mars Volta’s vocabulary. See the Omar Rodríguez-López gear guide.) Albert Hammond Jr (the Strokes) confirmed ownership in a tweet. Mike Shinoda is shown using it to create samples in a video at 0:46. Geordie Greep has one visible in a photograph of his pedalboard from his black midi years.

Tier three: honest caveats

Noel Gallagher is the attribution to treat with the most care, and the interesting thing is that Equipboard’s own contributor says so. The evidence is a photograph from a Mix magazine feature on the recording of Who Built The Moon?, showing a batch of pedals in the studio; the caption reasons that because Gallagher is known to own three hundred pedals, “we can certainly conclude that those were his pedals.” That is an inference about ownership from a room photograph, not a documented use. The album credit on Equipboard for Who Built The Moon? rests on the same picture. It is plausible — David Holmes’s production on that record is full of exactly this kind of texture — but it is not the same class of evidence as Taylor York on camera. Our Noel Gallagher gear guide deals with the confirmed parts of that rig.

Similarly, several of Equipboard’s album credits — Voices by Phantogram (2013), Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part I by Foals (2019), LUMP’s Animal (2021), the John Wick: Chapter 4 score (2023) and Simon Raymonde’s Ojalá (2017) — are community submissions of varying strength. The Raymonde one is at least poetically appropriate: EarthQuaker’s own bass column explicitly cites 4AD and the Cocteau Twins as the reference point for the pedal’s chorus setting, and Raymonde was the Cocteau Twins’ bassist. If you want the source of that sound rather than the tribute, our Robin Guthrie gear guide is the place to start.

Finally, some names get invoked around this pedal that do not belong to it. Robin Guthrie, Kevin Shields and Billy Corgan built the shoegaze pitch-instability vocabulary the Rainbow Machine plays in, but they did it years earlier with chorus units, tremolo arms and tape. They are reference points, not users. See Kevin Shields and Billy Corgan for what they actually used.

Eight Settings Worth Stealing

EarthQuaker publish exactly two named settings on the product page — “Master Tape Chorus (with Momentary Magic Falling Stars)” and “Phantasms” — and no numeric values for either. The following are reconstructed from EQD’s own written pro tips, Aaron Rogers’s three annotated bass examples, and Saufley’s review descriptions. Treat them as directions rather than coordinates.

1. The RYAT Double-Track

Every knob at noon. That is the whole setting, and it is EarthQuaker’s own documented use in the RYAT session where it functions as “a tasteful double tracking effect.” Unison pitch, moderate everything, no Magic. On a Rhodes it disappears into the instrument; on a clean guitar it reads as a slightly seasick chorus. This is the setting that proves the pedal is not only a noise box, and it is where every new owner should start.

2. Master Tape Chorus

Pitch at noon, Primary around 11 o’clock, Secondary about 10 o’clock to add the third voice, Tracking high for tight lag, Tone rolled toward the darker end. EQD’s own pro tip spells out the principle: “With the Pitch control set to noon, the Rainbow Machine acts as a chorus. Use the Primary control to adjust the wet signal volume and select the delay time with the Tracking control.” Owners on r/guitarpedals repeatedly single out this chorus as one of the best available on any pedal, and compare it favourably to the Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl for “bubble” character. If you want the conventional version of this sound, the Boss CE-2 and EHX Small Clone are the reference points; the Rainbow Machine is what happens when the reference point is left in the sun.

3. Falling Stars (momentary)

Build setting 2, then set Magic somewhere past two o’clock and leave it off. Play your part clean. At the end of a phrase, hold the Magic footswitch for a beat and release. Because Pitch is at noon here you get a shower of unison regeneration rather than a pitch climb; nudge Pitch slightly below noon first and the whole shower sinks. This is the single most useful live technique the pedal offers and the entire reason Magic got its own switch.

4. Ascending Pixie Trails

Pitch clearly above noon, Tracking rolled down for a long lag, Magic around eleven o’clock, Tone bright. Each repeat climbs. Aaron Rogers’s Example 2 is exactly this — “the Pitch control is set well above noon for cascading upwards repeats” — and it is the sound most people mean when they say “Rainbow Machine.” Play sparse single notes and let it build; play chords into it and it turns to soup.

5. Subharmonic Rumble

Pitch fully counter-clockwise for the fourth below, Secondary up to add the octave beneath that, Primary moderate, Tracking high, Tone dark, Magic off. Saufley found “an almost-robotic, Duane-and-Dickey harmony-lead sound” at mild settings here; push Secondary and it becomes a synth bass line running under your part. On bass guitar this is the pedal’s most straightforwardly musical setting. Compare with the EHX Nano POG if what you actually want is a clean octave down — the POG will track better and never surprise you, which is the point.

6. Barracho Pedal Steel

Pitch a third up, Primary and Secondary moderate, Tracking mid, Magic off — then move the Pitch knob by hand while you play, or route an expression pedal to it. Saufley described “cool, seasick, quasi pedal-steel effects” from manual manipulation alone. With an expression pedal this becomes the pedal’s whammy mode, and it is a genuinely different animal from a DigiTech Whammy: no quantising, no note snapping, just a continuous smear between intervals.

7. Echoplex Impersonation

Tone and Magic both set moderately rather than aggressively, Tracking low, Pitch just off noon. Saufley: the pedal “will just as easily approximate an Echoplex-style short delay, replete with tape-warble-like modulation and an ethereal feedback trail.” This is the most-missed setting on the pedal, because most people push Magic to the far end and never find out what it does at nine o’clock.

8. Teleportation Device

Magic and Tone both cranked, Pitch slightly right of centre, Tracking counter-clockwise. Saufley’s reference is the intro to the Butthole Surfers’ “Who Was in My Room Last Night” — “star-trail, fade-to-dream sonics.” This is the far end. It is uncontrollable by design, it will produce distortion and synthetic squall if you push further, and it is the reason people either keep this pedal for a decade or sell it in a fortnight.

How It Compares

Buying Guide

Which version to buy

Buy the V2 unless you have a specific reason not to. It is twice as loud, quieter in the noise floor, has more usable Tracking range, and — the big one — has Flexi-Switch on the Magic footswitch, which turns the pedal’s headline feature into something you can play rather than something you set. The V1 is not a bad pedal, but every one of the V2’s changes addresses a real V1 complaint.

How to identify a V2 from a listing photo

Look at the knob layout: on the V2, Primary sits on the left and Secondary on the right, a swap from the original. Ask the seller whether the footswitches are soft-touch or mechanical — the V2’s are silent relay switches with no click. If a listing says “2011–2017” in the year field, it is describing the V1 run.

Board planning

It draws only 68 mA, so power is rarely an issue, but it needs an isolated 9V output — EarthQuaker are emphatic about not using daisy chains or non-pedal-specific supplies with their DSP devices, and the Rainbow Machine’s noise floor rewards clean power. The enclosure is 4.65 x 3.65 inches, wider than a standard EQD box because of the second footswitch, so budget the space. The relay switching means no power, no signal — this is not a pedal that passes dry audio when your board dies.

Expression pedal

The expression jack controls Pitch, and this is the single best upgrade to the pedal. Owners report success with a range of expression pedals beyond the Moog EP-3 that gets recommended by default, including the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Expression Ramper and the Rainger FX Igor. One practical note from an owner: with the Igor, the sweep starts at unity and only shifts pitch upward, which suits brief punch-in gestures rather than full-range sweeps.

Who should skip it

Be honest with yourself here. If you need accurate harmony, buy a harmoniser. If you play in a covers band and need repeatable sounds, buy something with presets. Equipboard’s aggregated owner CONS list is short and fair: the sound “may be too outlandish for traditional music styles,” and it “requires time to master due to its complex controls.” The user reviews on Effects Database are more brutal still — two reviews averaging 4.75 out of 10, with one owner writing that they don’t know that it’s “very usable in a real-world setting.” That is a minority view given how many professional boards it is on, but it is a real one, and it usually belongs to someone who bought the pedal expecting a chorus and got a wizard.

Living With It

The most common owner sentiment on forums is a love-hate cycle: people describe finding it useful “every other time” they reach for it, depending entirely on the setting. That is not damning — it is what happens with a pedal whose useful range is narrow at each extreme and enormous overall. The players who keep it are the ones who found their two settings and stopped searching.

Placement matters more than with most effects. Devin Townsend’s approach — a delay before it, feeding into each other — is one worth trying, because putting time-based effects in front gives the pitch shifter more material to mangle. The more conventional placement is late in the chain, after dirt and before your reverb, which is where EarthQuaker’s own demo recordings put it: their audio samples run Rainbow Machine into Avalanche Run, not the reverse.

It is emphatically not a guitar-only device. EarthQuaker’s own copy says it “can be used on bass, keys, vocals or anything else you can dream up,” and the documented use backs that up hard: RYAT on Rhodes, Juan Alderete on bass in an EQD-produced film, Toshi Kasai and John Vanderslice using it as a studio processor, Thom Yorke running it on vocals. Owners specifically single out bass and vocals as applications where it produces something more interesting than it does on guitar. If you have a Freeze or a MEL9 and enjoy the way those pedals reward non-guitar input, this belongs in the same part of your brain.

Build quality is not in question. Premier Guitar gave it five picks out of five for build in 2012, and the pedal carries EarthQuaker’s limited lifetime warranty — if it breaks, they fix it. Fourteen years in production, across two versions, is its own kind of quality statement.

Frequently Asked Questions