Every effect and board that comes with Chirp. Each one plays in Studio from its link, opens in the editor to show how it's wired, and can be remixed with credit under its licence.
Pads from a guitar: every note fades in with no pick attack, a fifth rises above it, phrases replay backwards, and a shimmer reverb holds it all in a cloud. Pad is the full wash; Lift adds the octave; Bare drops the reverse for clarity.
An amp's preamp and its real tone stack: a tube-like gain stage into the treble, bass and middle network of a '59 Bassman, a JCM800 or a blackface Fender, worked out from its parts, so the knobs interact as they do on the amp (noon is a mid scoop; middle down thins the bass too). Play it into a power amp and cabinet, or a clean amp.
A bucket-brigade echo: warm, dark repeats that get darker and rounder each time around, with a slow wobble in the line. Turning Time while you play bends the repeats' pitch, as the chips do; high Feedback runs away into a soft, saturated swell instead of harsh noise.
A resonant filter that sweeps up and down by itself, in time with the song: Division sets how long one sweep takes, Freq where it's centred and Depth how many octaves it travels. Low-pass for a synth-like throb, band-pass for a talking wah, high-pass for a thin, airy pulse.
Sweeps the sound from side to side: the left and right levels move in opposite directions, smoothly or in a triangle. Best in stereo, on headphones or two amps.
Plays what you just played in reverse, in chunks you set with Length: swelling, sucked-in phrases like a tape flipped over. Feedback sends the reversed sound back in to be reversed again, so repeats alternate forwards and backwards.
Plays what you just played in reverse, in chunks a beat, a dotted eighth or an eighth note long, so the sucked-in swells land in time with the song. Feedback sends the reversed sound back in to be reversed again.
A glitch stutter locked to the tempo: on the beats the Pattern picks, it grabs the last slice you played and repeats it like a stuck record, then lets go on the next beat. Size sets the slice (an eighth down to a 32nd), Fade how fast the repeats die away, and Mix how much of it you hear.
A fuzz beside a clean boost, slots 2 and 3 side by side, as bass players blend a fuzz with their clean tone: the clean lane keeps the low end and the note's definition under the fizz. Clean plays the boost alone, Blend both, Fuzz the fuzz alone; the lane switched off fades out.
A British amp in a box: a tight input, an oversampled tube stage, the bass-middle-treble tone stack, then a speaker cabinet (low and high roll-off with a presence peak) so it sounds right straight into a desk or headphones.
A guitar speaker cabinet for recording or playing straight into a desk or headphones: it rolls off the lows a real speaker can't move and the fizz it can't reproduce, with the body thump and presence peak of a 1x12, 2x12 or 4x12.
Amp-style tremolo: the volume rises and falls with a smooth, triangle or choppy square wave.
Up to 20 dB of clean gain for solos or to push an amp or a drive harder, with a Voice switch: Flat, Bright (lifts the treble lost in long cables) or Fat (more low end).
Every clipping curve in one pedal: the Curve knob steps through soft, hard, diode, tube, cubic, fuzz and wavefold while you play, so you can hear what each does to the same notes. Bias makes any of them lopsided; Blend mixes the dry signal back in.
A studio compressor for guitar: anything louder than Threshold is turned down, by as much as Ratio says, so soft notes and hard ones come out closer in level and sustain longer. Attack lets the pick through before it clamps down; Mix blends the squashed sound with the dry one (parallel compression), keeping the attack and the evenness.
A big, dark hall: the first reflections off the walls arrive after the pre-delay, then a long, slowly moving tail builds behind them. Size stretches the room; Low cut keeps the tail from muddying the bass.
The rhythmic echo behind countless arena guitar parts: play straight eighth notes and a dotted-eighth repeat fills the gaps between them into a cascading sixteenth-note pattern. A second tap from the same delay line adds a quarter-note echo for an even denser pulse.
Sounds like the part was played twice and panned apart, as studios did with automatic double tracking: a copy slightly out of tune, a few milliseconds late and drifting a little, on the other side from the original. Width spreads them apart; at zero both sit in the middle for a thick mono double.
A classic rock rig: a green overdrive used as a boost into a British amp in a box, with a short echo and a spring. Clean drops the amp's gain; Crunch is the amp alone; Lead kicks in the boost for sustain and a touch more echo.
Two rigs side by side, one a row: a warm valve amp into a 1x12 cab and a plate, beside a British crunch into a 4x12 and a spring. Clean plays the valve rig alone, Crunch blends both, and Lead hands over to the British rig, driven harder. A rig switched off fades out rather than cutting.
A tempo-synced echo that gets out of the way while you play and swells up in the gaps, like the studio trick of ducking a delay under the vocal. Duck sets how far the repeats drop under your playing, Recover how quickly they come back when you stop.
A compressed valve drive and a tape echo, with a bitcrusher fully wet in slot 4 beside the dry sound: a layer of grit and hiss under the guitar rather than instead of it, like a worn record played along. Clean leaves it out, Dust blends it in, Broken crushes it harder.
Auto-wah: the harder you pick, the higher a resonant filter jumps, then it falls back as the note fades. Funk in a box.
A wavefolder, the synth trick, on guitar: past full scale the wave folds back on itself instead of flattening, so turning up Folds adds ever-higher, bell-like and ripping harmonics. Symmetry makes the folds lopsided.
Four phaser stages swept together by an LFO and mixed with the dry sound, so two notches glide up and down the spectrum. Resonance feeds the last stage back to the first through a one-sample history.
A reverb that can hold a chord forever. With Freeze off it is a lush, slowly moving room; switch Freeze on and the reverb stops taking in new sound and keeps what it has, a pad you can play over. Switch it off and the pad fades away.
All eight slots in one line, row 1 into row 2, as a classic pedalboard: gate, compressor, a screamer in front of a British amp, EQ, chorus, analog delay and plate. Rhythm adds the chorus, Crunch drives the amp harder, and Lead kicks the screamer in with more delay.
The big 1980s reverb that stops dead: a dense, bright room that's cut off a moment after you stop playing, so chords sound huge but never wash into each other. Hold sets how long it lingers after the note; Threshold how hard you must play to open it.
The classic green overdrive, from its circuit: the op-amp's feedback loop with two silicon diodes across it, worked out from the diode equation and antialiased. Only the mids and highs above 720 Hz are driven, and the clipped part is added back over the clean signal, so the low end stays tight and the tone has that famous mid hump. Great as a boost in front of another drive.
The early-60s brown amp tremolo: the guitar is split into lows and highs, and each pulses against the other, so the tone sways from warm to bright instead of just getting louder and quieter. In time with the song.
Adds a second voice at a fixed interval: an octave down, a fourth, a fifth or an octave up. Detune lets the voice drift a little, like a second player.
A whole guitar amp into its speaker cabinet, for playing straight into headphones, a desk or a recording: a tube-like preamp, the real tone stack of a '59 Bassman, a JCM800 or a blackface Fender, a power amp that rounds off when pushed, and a cabinet as an impulse response (a 1x12 or 2x12 open back, a 4x12 or a modern 4x12). Gain from clean to crunch to lead; Presence lifts or softens the top before the speaker.
A speaker cabinet as an impulse response, to put after a drive, a fuzz or the Amp Stack when you play into headphones or a desk: a 1x12 or 2x12 open back, a 4x12 closed back or a modern 4x12. Mic moves the microphone from the cone's centre (bright) to its edge (darker, fuller); Low Cut and Hi Cut trim what's left.
A very short delay swept by an LFO and fed back on itself: the jet-plane whoosh. Regen past the middle turns the feedback positive and metallic; below it, hollow.
Keeps peaks under a ceiling: anything louder than Threshold is turned down at once and let back up over Release. Use it last on a board to tame spikes from fuzz, resonant filters or self-oscillating echoes.
Fewer bits and a lower sample rate turn the guitar into an old sampler or a video game; a little hiss and a dark filter finish the cassette feel.
A wall-of-sound fuzz in the Big Muff tradition: two clipping stages in a row for endless sustain, then the scooped tone control that blends a low-pass and a high-pass. Mids fills the scoop back in so it cuts through a wash of reverb.
Four echoes from one delay line, spaced on the beat grid, with their levels set by a rhythm pattern: Straight fades out evenly, Gallop skips the second, Off-beat answers between your notes, Swell builds up instead of dying away. Spacing sets the grid: eighths, sixteenths or eighth triplets.
Silences hiss and hum between notes. Put it after high-gain drives. Threshold sets how loud a note must be to open it; Release how quickly it closes after. Turned all the way up it chops notes into a staccato stutter.
A monophonic synth that plays the notes you play: it tracks the pitch of each note and sounds an oscillator there (or an octave or two down, or one up), as loud as you pick it and only while a note sounds, through a low-pass filter. Glide sets how it slides between notes, from instant to a slow portamento. Play single notes; it lands about 40 ms after the pick.
An octave up blended in before a fuzz, for the ringing upper-octave lead sound. Best on the neck pickup above the 12th fret.
A warm drive and a chorus, then the echo and the hall side by side instead of one into the other: the repeats stay crisp because they never go through the reverb, and the hall never smears them. Room is the hall alone, Echo brings the repeats in, and Huge opens both right up.
New York compression for guitar: a hard-working compressor in a lane beside the dry sound, so the sustain and evenness come from the squashed lane while the pick attack comes through untouched. Then an EQ, a chorus and a plate for a polished clean. Light, Squash and Shine on the footswitches.
Tape Echo whose repeats bounce between left and right. Bounce at zero is the original's stereo echo; all the way up, each repeat lands on the other side.
The pitch-bending pedal: Position sweeps the note from where you played it up to an octave (or down, or a fifth, or a dive two octaves down), gliding as fast as Glide lets it. In Manual, Position is where the bend is: put it on an expression pedal. Rise bends up once a beat and Wobble sways up and back in time, as far as Position says.
A studio plate: four allpasses smear the attack into a dense wash, then two delay lines pass it back and forth through damping filters, each side moving slightly differently so the tail spreads wide. Pre-delay keeps the note clear of the reverb.
A rhythm board locked to one tempo (tap it in, or the DAW sets it): a slicer, a dotted-eighth echo and a step filter, with a spring to glue them. Echo plays just the dotted eighths; Chop slices the chords into sixteenths; Gallop switches the slicer and filter to a galloping pattern.
A resonant filter that travels from one setting to another and back, the way Chase Bliss pedals ramp their knobs: it rises, falls or bounces at Rate, along a straight or bent path (Curve), from Freq across Range octaves (down, if Range is below noon). Per note starts a fresh sweep at each pick attack, for a quacky envelope filter you can shape.
From the circuit: a slow op-amp with huge gain (its two ground legs set where the gain starts, and its bandwidth shrinks as the gain grows, which darkens and thickens it), into a 1k resistor and two silicon diodes to ground, worked out from the diode equation and antialiased at twice the rate, then the famous Filter knob: turn it up for a darker, smoother sound. From crunchy rhythm to a buzzing wall.
Modern high gain: a noise gate, a tight low cut, two oversampled clipping stages for saturated sustain, a scooped tone stack and a cabinet. The Gate knob sets how hard the silence between riffs is.
Multiplies the guitar by an oscillator for clangorous, bell-like and robotic tones. Track bends the oscillator up as you pick harder, so the clang follows your playing.
Three reverbs in one, and one knob to move between them: a short, tight room, a medium plate and a long hall all run at once from the same diffused input, and Space fades from one to the next (room on the left, plate in the middle, hall on the right) at an even loudness. Decay lengthens all three together.
The spinning organ speaker: a crossover splits the guitar into a horn and a drum that turn at their own speeds, each with the pitch wobble and the swell of a speaker going round. Switch Speed and they speed up or slow down the way the real one does, the light horn in about a second, the heavy drum over several. Brake stops them.
A reverb built from scratch: three diffusers smear the input, then two delays feed each other through a damping filter and a crossfeed. Shimmer blends an octave-up shifter into the loop, so each pass of the tail rises an octave into a glowing pad.
Wall-of-sound shoegaze: a Big-Muff-style fuzz, a slow woozy chorus, a warbling tape echo and a huge shimmer reverb that blooms an octave up. Dream keeps it clean and floating; Wall slams the fuzz on with the echo trailing; Bloom throws everything into the reverb.
A two-transistor-style fuzz: a bass cut tightens the input, then a clipper you can push from gritty to a wall of sustain. Bias makes the clipping lopsided, the way a starved fuzz splutters.
Late-60s psychedelia: a warm valve amp just breaking up, the watery throb of a Uni-Vibe, an organ's spinning rotary speaker and a studio plate. Vibe is the throb on its own; Slow swaps it for the rotary at chorale speed; Fast speeds the rotor up, and going back to Slow winds it down the way the real one does.
The rockabilly and country echo: one quick repeat right behind the note, the way two tape machines made it in the 1950s, a little darker and a little driven. Time sets how tight it is; Repeats adds a second and third slap.
Chops the sound into a rhythm locked to the tempo: hold a chord and it plays the pattern for you. Division sets the note value of each slice, Pattern which slices sound (straight, gallop, off-beat or a stutter), Length how long each slice lasts and Smooth how hard its edges are.
An intelligent harmonizer: a second voice a third, a fifth or an octave from each note you play, kept in your key and scale, so the harmony moves the way a second guitarist's would instead of in fixed parallel steps. It follows the note you play and tunes the voice to the scale note exactly. Key turns from C (all the way down) through every semitone to B (all the way up). Single notes, as the pedals that do this ask.
The surf-amp spring tank: a chain of tight allpasses gives the chirpy drip, then two short delays bounce off each other through a damping filter. Drip sets how splashy the attack is.
A starved, dying-battery fuzz: the transistor curve is biased off centre so notes break up, splutter and choke as they decay, and a gate cuts them off ragged. Starve sets how close to dead the battery is.
A resonant filter that jumps between two positions in a rhythm locked to the tempo, for synth-like sequenced wah. Pattern sets which steps open the filter; Glide makes the jumps slide; Base and Depth set where it sits and how far it leaps.
Makes a mono guitar wide and sets how wide a stereo one is. Spread delays the right side by a few milliseconds (the Haas trick: the ear hears width, not an echo); Width then narrows the image to mono or pushes it wider than the source.
A mixing-desk EQ for the whole board: a low cut to clear rumble, bass, a sweepable mid and treble, and a high cut to tame fizz. It starts with a gentle 3 dB lift where the mids sit, so the sweep is easy to hear.
A glitchy, tempo-locked board for loops and electronic sets: a beat-repeat stutter, a phaser that sweeps once every half note, an echo that ducks under your playing and backwards swells, all following one tempo (tap it in, or let the DAW or MIDI clock set it). Verse is a clean phased echo; Glitch fills the end of every second bar with 32nd-note stutters; Reverse turns the tails backwards.
Adds a note an octave below what you play, and another two octaves below, for bass lines on a guitar or a huge single-note riff. Sub and Sub 2 set their levels, Dry the original; Tone rounds the low notes off. Smooth shifts the note down; Analog divides it as a Boss OC-2 does, with no delay and a buzzier, synth-like growl. Works best on single notes played cleanly.
A surf amp in a box: drippy spring reverb, amp-style tremolo and a quick tape slapback. Clean is reverb and slap; Trem adds the tremolo; Tidal turns up the drip and the trem speed.
A compressor built from a formula: the louder you play, the more it turns you down, so notes ring longer and chords even out. Blend keeps some of the attack from the dry signal.
Four phaser stages swept in time with the song: pick one sweep a bar, a half note, a beat or an eighth note, and it stays in time when the tempo changes.
An auto-wah that rocks in time with the song: a resonant band-pass filter swept by a note-value LFO. Smooth rocks back and forth like a foot on a wah; Up and Down sweep once per note, for a funky quack or a backwards whoosh.
A compressor, then the guitar splits in two: a sub octave through a lowpass envelope filter for a synth bass, beside an octave fuzz through a wah that sweeps on every eighth note, and a dotted-eighth echo over both. Bass and Fuzz play one lane each; Both stacks them.
Makes the guitar talk: two resonant filters sit where a voice's vowel formants are, and your picking moves them from one vowel to another. Dig in and it says "wah", "yeah" or "ow"; play softly and it hums.
Repeats saturate on the way onto tape, wow and flutter wander the pitch, and the feedback path can stay clean, saturate into self-oscillation, go lo-fi or darken. The Delay template's tape line, rebuilt as an effect anyone can open.
Saturated, wobbling tape repeats that land in time with the song: pick a note value instead of milliseconds. Change the tempo and the tape bends to the new speed.
Pulls the plug on the tape machine: the sound slows down, dropping in pitch until it grinds to a halt, then spins back up. Every bar and Every 2 bars stop on the last beat, in time with the song; Stopped holds it stopped and Running lets it play, so a DAW lane or a footswitch can stop it exactly where you want. Stop and Start set how long each takes.
An echo that locks to the tempo: pick the note value (a quarter, a dotted eighth, an eighth or an eighth-note triplet) instead of milliseconds, and the repeats land in time whatever the song's speed. Style chooses crisp digital repeats, dark analog ones, or repeats that bounce between the sides.
Amp-style tremolo that pulses in time with the song: choose quarter notes, eighths or triplets instead of a speed, and change the tempo without retuning it.
A tremolo whose speed follows your playing dynamics. Hard picking pushes it into a fast flutter; as the note decays it settles back to the Rate setting.
The late-60s throb: four phase stages tuned far apart, swept by a lamp that brightens quickly and fades slowly, so the sweep lurches instead of gliding. Chorus mixes it with the dry sound for the famous watery pulse; Vibrato plays only the shifted sound, so the pitch wavers.
The mixing toolbox: gain, left-right balance, stereo width from mono to extra wide, and a polarity switch to fix two amps or mics cancelling each other.
A tube-style drive: the clipping curve is biased like a triode, so it adds warm even harmonics and compresses as you dig in. Sag shifts the bias further for a looser, more lopsided break-up; the three-band EQ comes after the tube.
True pitch vibrato: a very short delay swept by an LFO, all wet, so the pitch itself wavers like a singer's. Turn Mix down for a chorus.
Takes the pick attack off every note and fades it in, like rolling the volume knob up by hand: violin-like swells. Two envelope followers race each other; the slow one's lead over the fast one is the fade.
A cassette left on the dashboard all summer: the pitch drifts and sags at random (wow), shivers quickly (flutter), and the top end has worn away. From a subtle haze to a seasick lo-fi warble.
The studio rig: compressor, boost and amp, then the echo and the hall in a lane of their own beside the dry sound, fully wet, so the notes stay clear and the ambience sits around them. Dry is the amp alone; Verse brings the echo and hall in; Solo adds the boost and longer repeats.
A short delay swept by an LFO that runs a quarter cycle apart on each side, mixed with the dry sound: shimmering and wide in stereo.
A short slapback tape echo, then a long ping-pong tape echo in a parallel lane beside the dry sound, so the long repeats spread wide without washing over the notes. Rhythm keeps it to the slapback; Lead brings in the long repeats.