The Way Huge Atreides
I’m really jazzed, because I get to help my good friend Jeorge Tripps debut a brand new pedal. Jeorge is the creator of Way Huge Pedals and arguably (if by “arguably” you mean “definitely”) one of the most brilliant pedal makers on the scene today. I’m honored to even make pedals in the same universe as him, to be honest. And now I get to help him release a brand new Way Huge Pedal? Life is good.
Did I have anything to do with this pedal’s conception? Its design? Its sound?
Nope. But I love it, and I think Jeorge is a genius, so I’m going to gush about it anyway.
So, a little backstory. A few weeks ago, I was having my weekly text with Jeorge, exchanging Seinfeld gifs, talking about life, and he says, “Josh, I have a new pedal coming out. Would you want to help release it?” And I said, “Absolutely. You didn't even have to ask.” That’s the whole point of this article, to introduce for the first time ever on the JHS Show website….(drum roll, please)....the Atreides Analog Weirding Module. As of today, this pedal has been released into the wild. You can buy it. I think you should. I'm excited to show it off. It's a very weird pedal that does a lot of funky stuff.
But before I give my two cents, I want you to hear about it straight from Jeorge himself:
“Atreides is the name of Paul Atreides from [the novel] Dune. He's the main character. In Dune (which is a sci-fi book), the House of Atreides has a weapon called the Weirding Module, which is a sonic weapon. You would speak words into it and it would shoot out sonic waves and destroy things.
“It really was inspired by the 1980 Electro Harmonix Mini Synthesizer Keyboard, which was used by Van Halen on the last tune on Fair Warning, “One Foot Out the Door.” It's something that I’ve always been a fan of. I've always loved those things. They literally are made of plastic and cardboard -- I'm not joking. They made them for one year, from 1980-1981. That's what inspired it. I was just like, “Oh my God, this is so cool. I want my guitar to sound like that.” Finally, I got it all together. We had an engineer who was getting ready to leave, but I'm like, “Hey, I'm dumping something on you, ‘cause I don't have time. Here's a block diagram. Here's the basic circuit analysis. This is what I want.”...And lo and behold, it works. I was pretty stunned.”
Now that Jeorge has walked you through how this pedal came to be, I'm going to go explain the controls. The Atreides has all sliders. Yup. That wasn’t a typo. We’re talking about a pedal that has no knob controls. That automatically makes it feel very different.
A lot of times this “slider” style of user interface makes the pedal do things that you would never do if it had the same controls with knobs. In this case, I love having all the sliders side-by-side. It's very synthesizer. It's very futuristic. It's very, very Dune. You have seven different settings for the slide control: volume (a master volume over the whole circuit), sensitivity and range (which controls for the envelope control), bright (a tone control for the fuzz circuit), fuzz (which has an insane amount of fuzz on tap), rate (the phase shifter, which is adjustable via the trim pot), and sub (which adds a sub octave).
The first thing I told Jeorge when I played it was, “This is a better Blue Box than I've ever imagined possible.” I love the MXR blue box. I think it's classic, but this goes way beyond the possibilities of anything that pedal was ever capable of doing. There is also a trim pot for the sub that basically goes from two octaves down to one. So, if you plug in a bass, you might want to flip that and only have the one octave down. My preferred setting for a pedal like this is a massive riff rock kind of thing. If you go back and watch this week’s episode of the JHS Show (which I highly recommend), you can hear the jam for yourself.
I'm going to be honest with you right now: riff rock is the only thing I want to play with this pedal, but for your sakes, I tried some other sounds. For the second jam, I had it set up as minimally weird as possible, sort of a late-seventies Robert Smith vibe with some distortion thrown in. For the third jam, I set up the pedal with all the sensitivity, I kept the fuzz, rate, and sub all the way down, plus I left the range pretty low. You really have to go back and watch these jams for yourself to get the full effect, but the possibilities here are pretty much infinite.
At the end of the day, every one of you could buy this pedal and pull something totally different out of it. There are so many textures and sounds and possibilities. The trick is that you have to play to this pedal and let it create new riffs.
I’m going to let Jeorge wrap up this article with a few final thoughts:
“You can make it sound different and do different things according to how you play. You can't just hand the Atreides to somebody that just plays their stuff [without experimenting]. If you jump on it and automatically start playing Stevie Ray Vaughan, it's going to sound like crap. Just utter garbage. Buy if you plug into it, and [play around] to find out what [the settings] do, you're going to experiment and go, ‘Oh, wow.’”
Josh here again. I'm honored to be a part of the Atreides Analog Weirding Module release. Go check this pedal out, purchase one, make your life a little better. It may even make you a better person. While you’re at it, go read Dune or watch the movie. Jeorge says the books are way better, and I trust him on that, but do what you gotta do.