The new Electro-Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher brings ’80s-style arcade sounds in a pedal
Crush your signal into Commodore 64 like oblivion
The new Electro-Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher will wrap around your guitar tone to make it sound a bit like an ’80s arcade game soundtrack. If you’ve ever wanted to get Donkey Kong or Pac Man style sounds out of your guitar, this pedal should help get you there.
Electro-Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher
This new EHX Mainframe pedal conjures up the era of Pac Man, and reminds me of my old Commodore 64 and the SID chip-style tunes that have come back in vogue in recent years. The pedal can crush your samples and bit rates from from 48kHz to 110Hz and 24-bit to 1-bit. All of which will make your guitar sound ever so ’80s and arcade machine like. It also has a handy High/Low/Band-Pass filter section, so you can mess with your signal even further, and shape the artefacts left over in the signal, after all that bit crushing and sample rate decimation.
Electro-Harmonix Mainframe Bit Crusher · Source: Electro-Harmonix
Sample Rate Tuning
The Mainframe also has a Sample Rate Tuning Mode which allows you to adjust the sample rate to match the key of your song. You can set it to continually adjust the sample rate based on what you are playing, as well.
It has programmable presets to save your sounds, and you can use it with an expression pedal to control any combination of the Mainframe’s controls. There is also a set of Secondary knob parameters with which you can fine-tune the Mainframe’s effect.
The pedal comes with a high quality buffered bypass and silent switching, so should work well on most pedalboard setups. The Mainframe comes with a standard EHX 9.6DC200mA power supply in the box.
You can hear it in action in the official demo video below.
RRP – USD 179
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