ETHEREAL – REVERBATION AND DELAY
How many times have you sat down in front of your favorite ambient pedal and felt like you needed weeks of training at NASA to use it? Knobs, switches, sliders... It's often SO difficult and frustrating to quickly find a usable tone on these things... With this firmly in mind, when we first considered making an ambient pedal, the Ease of use was a top priority, right up there with premium sound on par with pedals at twice the price.
How do you describe a pedal like the Wampler Ethereal? Does the ambient sky cover it? Is it the bridge between real life and the astral plane? Or is it just beautiful? It's hard to know which phrase to use when talking about it, because they all match perfectly... plus, of course, so easy to use, you'll instantly get those perfectly ethereal tones.
When designing the Ethereal, these were the EXACT thoughts that were going through Brian Wampler's mind. He wanted to create as pure a delay as possible, with a time down to 1s, a thick reverb, and then have the ability to mix them all together and put them together into one glorious effect that will send you far…all the way making it as easy to use and find the perfect tones as possible.
Oh, and did we tell you - it's been a bit of a secret, there isn't one delay hiding in the Ethereal, there are two! The first delay constantly stays there like a heartbeat, coming back to you on the quarter note, we then layer another on top - this one can be put into a triplet pattern, or a dotted 8th (so you can get that beautiful black + dotted 8th mix) and even a self-oscillating eighth dotted pattern that just takes you in and leads you over the edge and down the rabbit hole into perfect ambiance... Things can get a little crazy when that one -this is selected, so you know, hit out – it's there to make some incredibly strange but beautiful sounds… See that little switch there? Yes, that's the one, just to the right of the stomp - it's a trails button. When this is used, delay patterns and reverbs will sound after the pedal is turned off, so you can even control what you want to send back to you.
While you enjoy the delay patterns, sitting underneath is this beautifully cavernous plate-style reverb that's alive with character and shape, which can be brought to exactly the right level (whether it's under your guitar, at the same level - unity, or even considerably louder) to complete the delay.
As you can imagine, this was a feat of engineering (and definitely worth the wait) because we wanted all of this to happen from a full-sized box, with the purity of tone and response you expect from a Wampler. So, as with our other time pedals, we split the incoming signal, the affected signal is then laid on top of the original base tone, ensuring that YOUR guitar sounds exactly like it does.
The Ethereal Wampler. Not only can it be used as a standalone reverb or delay pedal, but it can be combined to make you worship, to lose in, to even help you inspect your shoes... but most of all, it was designed to inspire you.