This has been one of the most exciting NAMM’s I can remember – purely because we revealed the Terraform and it’s the kind of pedal we’ve been fantasising for literally years about making. Once we worked out we could do it, we approached it the only way we know how, and that’s with a ‘gloves off’ mentality. After looooong discussions about functionality, we came to the conclusion that we wanted controls to be right there up the front with no endless sub-menus or scrolling through tiny screens. This, obviously, means that the feature set won’t be as comprehensive as some of the other pedals that occupy this corner of the market, but you know, in my experience (as an owner of two of the biggest sellers out there), the best sounds I ever got from those was by not doing all the tweaking – we needed to make sure it is easy to use with best sounds, right there.

11 custom designed effects which are: Slow Gear style, U-Vibe, Phaser, Through Zero Flanger, Subtractive Flanger, Additive Flanger, Chorus, 3 Voice Chorus, Dimension Style Chorus, Tremolo and Harmonic Tremolo.  We are constantly tweaking (we get sent them as plug ins to tweak in Logic) these as we want to make sure they are perfect, so right now – at the time of writing – this is how it is looking – we are currently working on a few things that may replace one or two of the effects, only time will tell. We wanted to make sure that the effects are ‘just there’ and sounding great from the outset and so far, all that I have heard are bang on.

Up front you have 5 basic controls: Rate, Depth, Blend, Volume and Wave-Shape. 4 of those will be easy to comprehend but all the magic is going to happen in the wave-shape. This is where the interesting and fun stuff will be held, and you guessed it, I’m not about to go into it all here, let’s just say because of this one control this pedal goes deeper than you would first think.

We definitely wanted there to be presets, as we can’t see how you can have a pedal like this without them. It had to be stereo… we also decided pretty early on that certain effects will want to be pre or post gain, whether that be dirt pedals or the effects loop of the amp. A 4 cable method (4CM) was of utmost importance, this means that when using 4CM the effects will be of course, mono. We had to think of a way to program which effect went pre and post – as the pedal comes out the box the obvious ones will be set accordingly when used in 4CM. You can change these yourself, quickly and easily by putting the pedal into ‘routing program mode’. Plus, it looks really cool when you do it as well!

Here’s some examples of how we see it being wired up. 

Stereo method.
Set the Terraform to Stereo, run it in a big ol’ line:

 

Pre/Post, straight in the front.
Set the Terraform to Pre/Post, place the dirt between the two ‘sides’ of the Terraform:

 

Pre/Post, FX loop method
Set the Terraform to Pre/Post, put one half of the Terraform in front, put the other half in the loop:

 

Looper method
Set the Terraform to Pre/Post, put Pre in a loop before your dirt, put Post after!

 

We have included 8 presets that stores everything and you can recall the presets either from the switch on the front or from your midi controllable looper. We wanted to put an expression pedal control in there as well, and give you the ability to control any one of the 5 dials up front, with the additional control of being able to set the high and low point of the pedal sweep – so, it’s not just a 0-100% and try to find it on the fly, you can set the exp to start at your preferred toe down and heel down position. So, instead of that exp being 0-100%, it might be heel down at 45% and toe down at 80% – you can set it exactly as you like.

Of course, we wanted it to be built the same way we always do and the way our customers expect, like a tank and in the USA. One of the most important things we could think of, make it as small as possible. So, although this is not in our regular double sized box (think Dual Fusion, Paisley Drive Deluxe, Fuzztration) but custom boxes designed specifically for this pedal that are almost an identical size. As you can imagine, this makes it considerably smaller than the others out there as we know that you are as concerned with pedal board real estate as we are! While I’m here, I just saw that Brian published the expected price on Facebook, how does $299.97 sound? I know, bargain! Right?

What we want to do with this is ensure we have the right effects in there. The ones shown at NAMM are all cool, but we know that there are things you think will make it better, so – Wampler hive mind. Based on what you’ve seen and what you now know, this is your chance to get in at the first floor – tell us what you think we should have in there! Now, I’m not making any promises, but we want to make sure it’s perfect for as many people as possible when considering their next mod pedal!

You can listen to the Terraform here…

 

Terrarform features in Andy’s video from 3:59!