HOLY ISLAND Tides Holy Island

Tides is fundamentally a highly tweak-able dirty reverb. A more accurate description of the pedal would be an atmosphere generator that allows you to craft perfect noisy waves of reverb. Usually you would be advised to place all dirt before your reverb pedal but Tides ignores this convention and is designed to add dirt after your dry signal has been blended with the wet signal. This approach enables you to create over the top fuzzy walls of sound sprinkled with interesting harmonics and sonic artefacts that would not be achieved otherwise.

This is the second iteration of the Tides circuit and I’ve made a few changes this time around, mostly to accommodate the requests I’ve had from customers as well as a few more subtle changes to the voicing of the circuit.

The Primary BluesBreaker style drive is now permanently engaged and has been adjusted to provide a more balanced range of drive sounds as well as being better voiced to stack with other drive pedals.

The Secondary gainstage has moved from a toggle to a footswitch. This allows you to flip between two different levels of saturation for dynamic shifts mid song. This gainstage works by adding a reverse transistor fuzz after the volume control. This means it will behave differently depending on how hard it’s being pushed by the Primary drive circuit. The Volume for this gainstage can be adjusted via an internal trimpot.

I’ve added a Voicing toggle that in the upward position keeps the original Tides V1 voicing and in the downward position engages a high frequency cut with a slight boost in saturation that lends itself perfectly to creating blown out fuzzy walls of sound.

Another big change to this second version of Tides is the Order Toggle. This swaps the position of the Primary drive in the signal chain. In the upwards position the Primary Drive is placed before the Reverb to act as a preamp for cleaner and less distorted sounds. In the downwards position the Primary Drive is placed after the Reverb circuit in the signal chain as it was in version 1 this gives a noisier, wilder character to the sound.

The momentary ‘swell’ foot-switch forces the pedal into self oscillation as the reverb signal is fed back into itself for wild washes of feedback as and when you desire and has now been moved to the center of the pedal and is slightly taller than the other two footswitches to make it easy to access without accidentally engaging/disengaging the other two footswitches.

The effects loop has stayed the same as the previous version. If you weren’t aware, this allows you to place any effect (or chain of effects) that you can imagine onto your reverberated signal to further expand the ability for sonic exploration and the discovery of new, unconventional sounds.

The ultimate shoegazers wet dream.

9V ‘BOSS style’ DC adaptor only. No Batteries.