The Garden Creeps
The Ethereal Garden is an ambient reverb effect designed for Emily Stienwall. I was introduced to Emily’s music through a friend who invited me out to a bar where Emily and her band were performing. The music instantly hooked me.
Particularly, I find myself getting hung up on one particular song over and over again – Welcome to the Garden. Welcome to the Garden is the title track from Emily’s album released in 2021. I recommend giving it a listen as it’ll probably help to add some context to the rest of this write-up.
Check it out here: https://emilysteinwall.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-the-garden
Welcome to the Garden is a wild 10-minute rock journey through a massive, ambient, sonic landscape. There is a cyclical pulse to the music that makes it feel alive. I found myself particularly drawn to the slowly-built, massive swells that grow until the composition then crashes back into a sobering calmness. It sounds huge both instrumentally and compositionally. This inexplicable feeling of a mysteriously ambient sonic mass became something I wanted to explore as well. Naturally, the chosen path became to build a reverb pedal.
Anyone familiar with analog effects will tell you that reverb is fantastic but is also a massive challenge to nail. Platforms capable of digital signal processing are way more efficient and effective at creating this particular effect. As such, I decided to try and get my hands on some FV-1 multi-effect ICs. These are some neat little chips that you can find in just about anything that has access to multiple audio effects like electric keyboards and karaoke machines. However, what makes this special is that these are all effects achieved digitally through this moderately powerful magic little rectangle.
I won’t go too deep into it, but these are essentially bare-bones microprocessing units that can be paired with some ROM to digitally build the sound you want.
For the initiated, more info can be found here. Do be advised, this is a lot of nerd stuff.
But otherwise all I have to worry about is some simple control, buffering and blending circuitry – and the FV-1 practically does the rest. Easy right? Absolutely not. I fought with this thing for a few months trying to develop something that was usable – let alone useful. Eventually, I got the hang of things with some help from a couple friends and internet resources and ended up stacking a bunch of the different accessible effect elements found on-board the chip. This finally led to making some pretty mystical, ambient sounds.
The result is a reverb with some subtly integrated shimmer, delay and feedback effects to create overlapping sonic layers that can build up and create a giant wall of sound if the controls are all turned up high enough. However, this feedback loop can become a little overwhelming, so I integrated an expression pedal control which allows the player to roll up or off that capacity for ‘build-up’. In the end, I’m super proud of this one. It perfectly achieves that feeling of a giant sonic mass when the feedback loop is fully engaged, and things beautifully contract back to a calmness when the feedback loop is rolled back again via the expression pedal.
Pedal Features:
– Dwell (Lengthens Reverb Resonance 0 – Infinite)
– Spread (Shimmer Tone Pitch Shift)
– Filter (EQ Filter for Wet Reverb Signal)
– Depth (Swell Echo/Delay Control)
– Grow (Feedback Loop Control)
– Mix (Dry/Wet Blend)
