Chase Bliss Generation Loss MKII: The Pedal That Spent $399 Teaching Your Guitar To Sound Like A Broken VCR

There is a moment, somewhere around the third hour of owning a Generation Loss MKII, when you stop trying to make it sound good and start trying to make it sound wrong in exactly the right way. That is the moment the pedal was designed for. Everything before it is confusion.

Here is the pitch, stated plainly, because Chase Bliss has never been shy about it: you have spent years and a considerable amount of money assembling a signal chain that is quiet, full-range, and faithful. The Generation Loss MKII is a 400-dollar box whose entire function is to undo that work. It adds hiss. It adds mechanical hum. It bends your pitch off centre at random. It drops out mid-phrase. It filters the top and bottom off your tone using EQ curves lifted from a camcorder, a dictaphone, and a children’s toy tape recorder. And it is one of the most quietly influential pedals of the 2020s.

The reason is simple, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia marketing. Every other artefact pedal on the market gives you a lo-fi sound. The Generation Loss MKII gives you the individual parts of tape degradation on separate knobs, so you can have one part of your imaginary tape machine catastrophically broken while the rest of it runs pristine. That is a fundamentally different proposition, and it is why the pedal ended up on boards belonging to alt-metal bands, Canadian roots guitarists, and ambient composers simultaneously.

The Origin Story: A Dog Named Cooper, A Company That Closed, And A Reissue That Became A Rebuild

Cooper FX, and the pedal that sold out

The original Generation Loss was not a Chase Bliss product at all. It came from Cooper FX, the one-man Minnesota operation run by Tom Majeski, and it was named — like the company itself — after Majeski’s dog, Cooper. The dog’s silhouette is still printed on the front of the MKII, which is the kind of detail that tells you what sort of company this is.

The brief for the original was narrow to the point of absurdity: recreate the sound of audio that has been dubbed from VHS tape to VHS tape until it starts falling apart. Generation loss, in the literal engineering sense — the cumulative degradation that happens every time an analogue copy is made from an analogue copy. Majeski built it, then built a V2, and the pedals developed the kind of cult reputation that translates into permanently sold-out status and ugly numbers on the used market.

2019: the collaboration

In 2019 Majeski collaborated with Chase Bliss on an enhanced reissue — a Cooper FX design built and distributed with Chase Bliss’s manufacturing and dip-switch philosophy bolted on. That version is the direct ancestor of the pedal we are discussing. It, too, sold out.

2021: Cooper FX closes

In November 2021, Majeski shut down Cooper FX after roughly seven years and joined Chase Bliss full time in Minnesota. Chase Bliss founder Joel Korte said at the time that their first project together would be a new Generation Loss. Worth flagging a small piece of press-history messiness here: some outlets, including Guitar World’s launch coverage, referred to him as “Tom Cooper,” conflating the man with the dog with the brand. His name is Tom Majeski. Cooper was the dog.

June 2022: the MKII arrives

Chase Bliss announced the Generation Loss MKII on 15 June 2022 at $399 / €469, taking preorders before building — the first pedal shipped under the company’s then-new direct-to-consumer model, in which stock is gauged by demand rather than pushed through dealers. Units shipped from roughly September to November 2022. Guitar.com’s Richard Purvis reviewed it on 6 December 2022 and scored it 8 out of 10, listing UK pricing at £414.

The crucial thing about the MKII is that it is not a reissue with extra features. Majeski and Chase Bliss went back to the beginning and rebuilt the concept through measurement rather than imagination — taking apart VCRs, camcorders, cassette decks and dictaphones and running frequency analysis on each one. The original was, in Chase Bliss’s own framing, “built through imagination and intuition.” The MKII was “built through study and analysis.” Both are in the box. There is a dip switch marked CLASSIC that flips you back.

Specifications

What Each Control Actually Does

Wow

Slow, smooth, random pitch modulation — the sound of a capstan that is not quite holding speed. It is vibrato without a pattern, which is exactly why it works: your ear cannot latch onto a cycle, so it reads the movement as physical rather than electronic. The manual nominates around 10 o’clock as the sweet spot for something evocative but not distracting. Past noon you are into melting-tape territory, and it gets nauseating fast — Purvis’s review flags precisely this, and he is right.

Flutter

Fast, twitchy, random modulation affecting both pitch and amplitude. Where Wow wobbles, Flutter shivers. It sits in the middle of the sound and never really moves, which makes it feel like texture rather than modulation. The single best trick in the entire manual lives here: turn Flutter up until you can clearly hear it, then turn it back down to the point where you stop noticing it. Leave it there. That is the setting that makes a clean amp sound like a record.

Note the difference between modes: in Classic mode Flutter drops the amplitude component and modulates pitch only.

Volume

Output level of the wet signal. Noon is unity; maxed is roughly a 2× boost. If ramping is engaged, this knob is repurposed as the ramp speed control — the volume setting is remembered, but you set it by holding the left footswitch while turning.

Model

Not a knob, a 12-way rotary switch, and the heart of the MKII. Each position is an EQ profile derived from frequency analysis of a real machine:

• OFF — bypasses the model entirely, unfiltered.
• CPR-3300 Gen 1, 2 and 3 — a beaten-up VHS deck, then a copy of that recording made on the same deck, then a copy of the copy. Three positions, one machine, increasing decay. This is the pedal’s thesis statement rendered as three clicks of a switch.
• Portamax-RT and Portamax-HT — a desktop four-track cassette recorder, the second played back at half speed.
• CAM-8 — a camcorder, sampled through its built-in mic.
• DICTATRON-EX and DICTATRON-IN — a handheld voice recorder, captured through its speaker with an external mic and with the internal mic respectively.
• FISHY 60 — a toy recorder. It sounds like one.
• MS-WALKER — a portable personal music player, designed by BlankFor.ms.
• AMU-2 — an imaginary machine, designed by AMULETS: deteriorated tape in a barely functioning recorder.
• M-PEX — a quarter-inch reel-to-reel running old, brittle tape, designed by Marcus Fischer.

In Classic mode this knob becomes LP: a resonant low-pass filter, counter-clockwise to remove highs.

Saturate

A mathematical recreation of magnetic hysteresis — the effect in which a loud signal recorded to tape physically shifts the magnetic structure of the medium, so the tape distorts everything that comes after it based on what came before. The sweep is deliberately subtle across most of its range, because that is how tape saturation actually behaves: felt more than heard. Push it to the extremes and you get mis-biased, genuinely gnarly textures.

Two things matter here. First, Saturate and Model are interactive: saturation happens before the model in the signal flow, so each machine emphasises different parts of the distortion. Second, the amount of saturation you get depends entirely on your instrument’s output — which is what the hidden Input Gain option exists to fix. Turn everything else off and this is a perfectly credible overdrive.

In Classic mode this knob becomes Gen: a sample-rate reducer. Counter-clockwise to degrade and introduce digital aliasing.

Failure

The MKII’s headline addition — the glitch behaviour that used to be buried now has its own knob. It is a multi-effect made of three separate malfunctions:

• Drops — brief silences caused by the playhead losing contact with the tape.
• Snags — abrupt pitch spikes from tape briefly catching.
• Crinkles and pops — micro-disturbances from weathered, uneven, dirty tape.

Drops and Snags can each be bypassed with a dip switch. Crinkles and pops have two components, and this distinction catches people out: there is the sound (an audible rustle you will hear even with no signal going in, its level adjustable in the hidden options) and the effect (the way that disturbance processes your incoming signal, crumbling and spiking it). The effect is the only part of Failure you cannot turn off.

In Classic mode this knob becomes HP: a resonant high-pass filter, clockwise to remove lows.

Dry

Three positions, and it changes the pedal’s personality more than any other switch. NONE gives you a pure tape machine with no clean signal at all. SMALL drops in a touch of clean, keeping the effect dominant while making the whole thing bigger and more detailed. UNITY matches your clean signal to input level — which is how you turn Wow and Flutter into a chorus rather than a warble. If you have never got on with the pedal, try UNITY before you sell it.

Noise

Two independent sources: hiss, and mechanical noise. Their levels are set separately in the hidden options, and mechanical noise is bidirectional — clockwise of noon gives you hum, counter-clockwise gives you VCR noise. Purvis’s advice in his review is worth repeating verbatim in spirit: switch the hiss off first, then decide whether you want it back. Background noise is evocative for about ninety seconds and irritating forever after.

Aux

The left footswitch runs one of three performance effects: Stop (a tape-stop that slows the wet signal to a rubbery halt), Filter (bypasses the selected model so your signal passes unfiltered — surprisingly musical as a lift), and Fail (maxes out the Failure behaviour for total malfunction). Tap for latching, hold for momentary. The onset speed is adjustable in the hidden options, from instant to a slow crawl, and that adjustment is what turns Aux from a gimmick into a usable arrangement tool.

The hidden fourth: Freeze

There is a fourth Aux function, restored from the Cooper FX V2 by popular demand, and the manual is charmingly unrepentant that it does not belong: tape machines cannot do this. To reach it, set the Aux toggle to FAIL, engage both DROP BYP and SNAG BYP dip switches, and make sure you are in Classic mode. Freeze captures and holds the last note or chord indefinitely, and you can then process that held drone with everything else the pedal has.

Stereo, And Why It Is Not An Afterthought

The Generation Loss MKII was the first stereo pedal in Chase Bliss’s classic small-format enclosure, and the implementation is unusual. With the SPREAD dip switch engaged in MKII mode, the stereo image is generated by the Failure knob — the drops, snags and crinkles land differently on the left and right channels, so the image moves because the machine is malfunctioning asymmetrically. Drops produce the most abrupt movement; bypass them and you get subtler drift from the crinkles alone.

In Classic mode, SPREAD does something entirely different: a smooth pan that moves in time with the Wow modulation.

MISO (Mono In, Stereo Out) splits a mono input to a stereo output. Combine SNAG BYP, SPREAD and MISO with every other knob at zero and you have something no other pedal does: a random stereo splitter that scatters your otherwise clean signal unpredictably between two amps.

One caveat worth knowing before you commit. Bypass behaviour changes with configuration. In the default state the pedal is true bypass with analog dry thru on both channels. With MISO on, the left channel becomes buffered bypass with analog dry thru while the right channel goes digital. With DSP bypass engaged, both channels are digital through, bypassed or not. If you are a true-bypass purist, MISO is not for you.

Ramping: The Feature Most Owners Never Touch

The dip-switch matrix along the top lets you automate any knob, either as a single one-time movement when the pedal switches on (ramp) or as continuous motion (bounce). Bounce defaults to a triangle wave; a RANDOM dip switch turns it into sample-and-hold behaviour. The knob’s physical position sets either the maximum or minimum of the range, depending on the SWEEP setting.

Three settings from the manual that are worth stealing directly:

• Tape Hopper (bounce + Model + random): each landing point is a different machine. One moment a camcorder, the next a reel-to-reel. Narrow the range with the Model knob.
• Maintenance Phase (bounce + Failure + random): the amount of malfunction changes organically over time, and with SPREAD on, so does the width of the stereo image.
• Filter Sweeps (Classic + bounce + LP + top sweep): a second layer of movement under a low sample rate. Set LP fairly high so the filter never sweeps to silence.

Expression and CV use the same dip-switch assignment system. Plug a pedal in with no knobs assigned and you get volume control by default.

Famous Players: What Holds Up, And What Does Not

Mike Stringer, Spiritbox — confirmed, and the most surprising name on the list

The strongest documented case comes from a place nobody would have predicted for a VHS-degradation pedal. Premier Guitar’s Chris Kies filmed a Rig Rundown with Spiritbox ahead of the Canadian alt-metal band’s show at Nashville’s Pinnacle, published 18 February 2026. Guitarist Mike Stringer’s board — built by a friend at Omilion Audio, and run alongside a Fractal Axe-Fx III with a PVH 6160 model based on the EVH 5150 Stealth — carries a Peterson StroboStomp, a Boss DD-6, an Electro-Harmonix Freeze, a pair of DigiTech Whammy Ricochets, a Line 6 DL4 MkII, Chase Bliss MOOD and Generation Loss, an EarthQuaker Devices Sunn O))) Life, a pair of EarthQuaker Rainbow Machines, and a Hologram Electronics Microcosm.

That is a texture board attached to a down-tuned seven- and eight-string metal rig — Aristides STX guitars in Arium, F-sharp tuning, Bare Knuckle Halcyon pickups, EverTune bridges. It is the clearest evidence available that Generation Loss is not a boutique-ambient curiosity. It is a production tool for making heavy music sound like it was recovered from a damaged tape.

Joey Landreth, The Bros. Landreth — confirmed

At the opposite end of the musical map. John Bohlinger’s Premier Guitar Rig Rundown with Joey Landreth, published 13 June 2023, documents a wet/dry rig built around three Two-Rocks — his signature model carrying only the dry signal, two Studio Signatures carrying only wet — with all wet effects routed through a Morningstar ML10X under the board and a GigRig G3 up top. The Chase Bliss content on that board is close to a full catalogue: Thermae, Blooper, MOOD MkII, Generation Loss and CXM 1978, plus a Condor driven by a Shnobel Tone VPJR tuner mod plugged into its expression input. An Empress Echosystem handles delay.

A slide player in open tunings using a VHS emulator is not the obvious pairing, which is the point: on a wet/dry rig, Generation Loss lives entirely in the wet path and adds age rather than effect.

An honest caveat on both

Premier Guitar’s gear lists in both Rundowns say “Chase Bliss Generation Loss” without specifying MKII. Given the dates — 2023 and 2026, both after the MKII shipped and long after the earlier versions sold out — the MKII is the overwhelmingly likely unit in each case, but we cannot confirm it from the text, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Names that circulate and do not survive checking

Gear databases and aggregator listings routinely attach big rock names to this pedal. Several of them are worth addressing directly, because the arithmetic alone settles it. Kurt Cobain died in 1994, twenty years before the first Cooper FX Generation Loss existed. Jeff Beck died in January 2023, weeks after the MKII began shipping, and there is no documentation of him ever using one. Graham Coxon, James Hetfield and Nuno Bettencourt all have exhaustively documented rigs in which this pedal does not appear.

These are not players who used a Generation Loss. In some cases they are players whose recorded sound the pedal can approximate — Cobain’s fourth-generation cassette-demo murk being the obvious example — and somewhere along the line “sounds like” curdled into “used one.” Treat any artist list for this pedal that predates 2015 as automatically false.

Lineage, not usership

The honest ancestry of this sound is not in guitar rigs at all. It is in home taping — the fourth-generation cassette dub, the VHS rip of a rip, the four-track demo that got better as it got worse. Guitar.com’s review name-checks the first two Sparklehorse albums, and that is the right reference point: Mark Linkous built records out of deliberately compromised recording chains a quarter of a century before anyone put it in a stompbox. The Generation Loss MKII is not emulating a guitarist. It is emulating a format.

Eight Settings Worth Dialling In

1. The invisible one

Model on any Portamax, Flutter just below the point where you notice it, Wow at zero, Saturate at 9 o’clock, Failure at zero, Noise off, Dry on SMALL. Nothing announces itself. Your amp just sounds like a record instead of a rig. Leave it on for a whole set.

2. Fourth-generation dub

Model on CPR-3300 Gen 3, Saturate at 2 o’clock, Wow at 10 o’clock, Flutter at 11, Failure at 9, Dry on NONE, hiss up in the hidden options. The full basement-cassette treatment. Devastating on clean arpeggios, unlistenable on distorted power chords — which is useful information.

3. The magnetic chorus

Dry on UNITY, Wow around 11 o’clock, Flutter at 9, Model OFF, Saturate at noon, Failure at zero. The clean signal beats against the pitch-drifting wet signal and you get a chorus that no chorus pedal makes, because the modulation is random. Add a touch of Failure for a chorus that occasionally forgets what it was doing.

4. Tape overdrive

Everything at zero except Saturate at 3 o’clock, Model on Portamax-RT, Dry on NONE, Input Gain set to high in the hidden options. A genuinely good, genuinely unusual drive: compressed, mid-forward, and filtered by a machine rather than a tone stack. Stack it in front of a real overdrive and it behaves like a preamp.

5. The dictaphone vocal-double

Model on DICTATRON-IN, Dry on NONE, Saturate at 1 o’clock, Flutter at 10, everything else off. Extreme midrange, no lows, no highs. Run it in parallel with your clean tone and it sounds like a second guitar recorded through a phone in the next room. Excellent for doubling a lead line.

6. Total malfunction

Failure maxed, Drop and Snag both enabled, crinkle/pop level up, SPREAD on, Model on AMU-2, Wow at noon. Aux set to FAIL with a slow onset so you can foot-switch the collapse in gradually. This is the sound of the machine giving up. Use it once per set, not once per song.

7. The random splitter

All knobs at zero. SNAG BYP, SPREAD and MISO engaged. Mono in, two amps out. Your signal skitters between the two unpredictably, otherwise clean. It is a stereo effect with no effect in it, and it is the single cleverest thing in the box.

8. Classic-mode freeze drone

CLASSIC on, DROP BYP and SNAG BYP on, Aux toggle to FAIL, Gen rolled back to introduce aliasing, LP around 2 o’clock, HP at 9. Hold a chord, hit Aux, and it sustains forever while you sweep the filters and the sample rate underneath it. Play over the top. This is a full ambient rig hidden inside one pedal.

How It Compares

Buying Guide

The Generation Loss MKII is still in production in 2026 at $399 direct from Chase Bliss, shipping in one to three business days, with free shipping, a thirty-day return window and — for European buyers — the company covering half the import fees through its Amsterdam operation. This is worth stating plainly because Chase Bliss retires pedals regularly and without much warning, and because the earlier Cooper FX versions have spent most of their existence sold out. If you want one, the direct channel is the straightforward route and the price has not moved since launch.

Buying used is reasonable but rarely a bargain. Chase Bliss pedals hold value stubbornly, and discontinued ones have historically appreciated. Check the following: that the microUSB port is intact (it is the firmware path, and the pedal shipped with v1.0.0 with v1.1.0 published subsequently — a unit that has never been updated is not broken, but it is worth knowing); that all sixteen dip switches move; that the 12-way Model rotary clicks cleanly through every position without dead spots; and that both channels pass signal in stereo, which requires actually testing with two cables rather than trusting a photo.

Who should not buy this pedal: anyone whose priority is tonal fidelity, anyone who wants a single-knob “make it lo-fi” solution, and anyone unwilling to read a manual. Chase Bliss builds instruments that require study, and this one has sixteen dip switches and six hidden parameters on top of six knobs. Guitar.com’s verdict deserves the last word on suitability — it is not for everyone, and using it well requires the self-control to use it sparingly.

Living With It

Power. 9V DC, centre negative, around 250 mA, mains only — there is no battery option. That current draw rules out the smaller outputs on some older supplies. It is standard Boss-style polarity, so no adapter oddities, but do give it an isolated output; a pedal whose job is generating hiss and hum deserves a clean supply.

Where it goes in the chain. Most people run it after drive and before time-based effects, so the degradation is applied to the dirt and then the delays and reverbs act on the degraded signal. Running it last is also legitimate and sounds like the whole recording is falling apart rather than just the guitar. On a wet/dry rig, in the wet path only, as Landreth does.

The noise question. The pedal generates noise on purpose, and the hidden options give you independent level control over hiss and mechanical noise. Set both to taste before you decide the pedal is too noisy. Also remember that crinkle and pop sounds are audible with no input at all — that is not a fault.

Presets. Only two onboard, via the toggle. Saving is a two-stage footswitch hold: hold the relevant footswitch for three seconds, then add the other for three more. The middle LED blinks to confirm. If you need more than two, you need MIDI, and MIDI needs a Chase Bliss Midibox to convert to the quarter-inch TRS jack. The free MIDI Controller plugin gives you full parameter access from a DAW, including the hidden options and the dip switches.

The external footswitch trick. The MIDI/aux jack accepts any normally-open momentary footswitch, which takes over the Aux function automatically with no configuration. If you use the pedal on a desk rather than a floor, this is the single most useful thing you can do with it.

Frequently Asked Questions