Superbooth 22: Finegear Dirt Magnet multi vintage effects lab
5,0 / 5,0 | 
Continuing their Arkive_Effects_ series Finegear introduces the Dirt Magnet. It’s a huge desktop effects box full of vintage analogue effects including a real Tape Delay.
Dirt Magnet
That’s a fabulous name following on from the similarly fabulous Dust Collector that we first saw at Superbooth 2019. This time around we have two LFOs, a Noise generation, a Crackle machine, Ring Modulator, VCF modelled after the Korg MS-20 and a genuine, real-life Tape Delay.
The Noise and Crackle are essentially generators but they also have audio inputs so you can mix other sources through them. There’s a bandpass filter in the Noise section with CV control over frequency and width. Crackle has a highpass filter and CV controlled Density.
The LFOs are actually digital so they can be synced to MIDI and offer sine, triangle and square waveforms, Sample & Hold and an envelope-shaped output. They have a Symmetry control for pulse width modulation and an offset knob.
For Ring Modulation you have CV control over the Carrier level and on the filter, you’ll find CV control over the cutoff.
Analogue Tape Delay
The Tape Delays is of course the centre of fascination with that huge bay filled with worming, snaking cassette tape. You have CV control over Gate, Speed, Regeneration (of feedback) and Panning. On the input, you have a preamp and tone control taken from the Space Echo. You then have the manual controls over the tape speed, feedback, panning, and attenuators on the CV. At the bottom is a Ping-Pong switch and a dry/wet mix knob. The output of the whole unit is in stereo.
Finegear Dirt Magnet · Source: Sonicstate YouTube
The Gate control is interesting. It controls the motor which Finegear hopes will offer a kind of Mellotron mode for continuous recording. The company is also exploring what can be done via the USB connection. There are some tweaks that still need to be finished and the unit on demo wasn’t fully working.
Finegear hopes to have Dirt Magnet in production after the summer for a price around €1,000.
Modmix
Finegear also had a mock-up of a forthcoming product called the Modmix. It’s a CV controlled experimental mixing console with routing and lots of modulation. It features 4 channels with 3-band EQ, volume and panning, 4 aux sends, and then two LFOs and two envelope followers. There are 4 stereo returns or you can switch the aux into feedback mode to fold back in on itself.
Finegear Modmix · Source: Sonicstate YouTube
Dramatic stuff! You’ll find a video here from SonicState.
Finegear is on booth Z335.
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One response to “Superbooth 22: Finegear Dirt Magnet multi vintage effects lab”
It would obviously increase costs and therefore price but I can’t understand for the life of me why they wouldn’t offer a stereo input/output model. This would be perfect as a remixing effects unit but hard pass for me as I mix in stereo.