Walrus Audio Qi Etherealizer: More Ambient than Hologram?
Chorus, Delay, Reverb and Granular Glitch in one!
4,2 / 5,0 | 
First, something for the reasonable and dedicated musicians – the Canva Rehearsal. Now, Walrus Audio presents the Qi Etherealizer, an ambient dream machine stuffed with DSP.
Qi Etheralizer: From Small to Big
Combining chorus, delay, granular effects, and reverb, the Qi Etherealizer offers a creative playground for endless sonic adventures. Creating lush, evolving sounds from just a single note is a breeze. Cascading delays, fluttering, glitch-y granular effects – parallel or serial – it’s all there.
But the pedal also excels when you need just a hint of chorus or a bit of slap delay. The Qi Etherealizer offers lots of flexibility and inspiration at the touch of a button. And every parameter setting can be saved and recalled in 127 preset slots—plenty to explore!
Functionality
The Walrus Qi Etherealizer (pronounced “chee ethereal-izer”) debuts Walrus Audio’s new proprietary DSP, MDSP, which is powered by an ARM-based Cortex M7 processor. Walrus claims MDSP is setting a new standard in high-fidelity audio and innovative design”. Judging from the press release, the platform will be the basis of many Walrus Audio pedals to come!
To dial in your desired effect, the pedal includes 12 controls: three each for the chorus, delay, and grain effects, a single dry/wet knob for the reverb (“Space), a tone control and a global dry/wet knob. The tone knob includes a low-pass filter to keep those piercing high frequencies at bay.
The Grain effect offers two different modes that the dedicated button can activate: Grain Cloud for more traditional glitch sounds and Phrase Sample, which creates rhythmic grain effects akin to those found in the Microcom Hologram or Chase Bliss Mood. Depending on the mode, the X control either sets the speed of the grains (Grain Cloud) or the delay of the chopped signal (Phrase Sample). The Playback dial changes between five different modes of how the created grains are played back:
- x1 is normal speed
- x2 equals double speed and +1 octave
- x .5 equals half speed and -1 octave
- Rev is reverse playback
- RNDM randomly combines the four other modes.
Chorus and Delay
For the delay you get controls for its speed (time) and intensity (feedback), plus a button to switch between quarter notes, dotted eighth notes or eighth notes. In comparison, you get two modes for the Chorus effect: tri-chorus, which consists of three delay lines with phase offset modulation applied to each delay line resulting or stereo, where the right channel’s modulation is offset by 180 degrees.
The Qi Etherealizer offers a live mode, where the signal is affected by turning knobs in real-time and three onboard-preset (red, green or blue LED) which can be accessed by hitting the bypass and freeze switches simultaneously. The pedal also comes with an optional trails mode, where when you go into bypass mode, the existing delay, reverb, and grain effects die off naturally instead of being cut off.
The other 123 presets can be accessed through MIDI program changes through the mini-jack MIDI-In on the back. In addition, almost every pedal parameter can be changed through MIDI CC messages. In terms of additional I/O, the pedal comes with stereo inputs, stereo outputs, and a USB-C port.
How much does the Qi Etherealizer cost?
+The Walrus Audio Qi Etherealizer is available in two color variants: black and cream*, or rosy clay* with additional artwork from Yvette. Both variants are available from Thomann for 519 euros.
More on the new Walrus Audio pedal
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