Back in late January, during the winter NAMM show in Anaheim, Chase Bliss Audio, KNOBs, and 3 Degrees Audio hit the effects world with some exciting news about a new pedal that they'd be collaborating on called the Blooper. The announcement came in the early days of the pedal's development, with the promise that fans willing to follow along would get a video update each month that covered new developments and features.
With each new update video unveiling more and more exciting features, flocks of fans have jumped on board to follow along with the highly anticipated pedal's progress. And after countless video clips of musicians getting hands-on time with the new pedal and recent teaser shots of its bespoke packaging posted to Chase Bliss' Instagram, we know we've been getting close to information on a release date.
Then, last week, Chase Bliss launched a Kickstarter campaign for the new Blooper—a decision that we wanted to about the motivations behind. "In 2019, Chase Bliss has experienced both unprecedented growth as well as taken a very aggressive R&D approach to new products," Joel from Chase Bliss told us.
"We are simultaneously working on our highly-anticipated Automatone line (non-crowdfunded, standard releases) and Blooper. We also released our most successful product to date, MOOD. With all of this investment happening, as well as the additional challenges posed by the ongoing trade-war with China, we’ve had to make some decisions to stay profitable and cash-flow healthy. In short, we needed money to make the things happen that we wanted to make happen and wanted to avoid taking out a traditional loan."
The campaign was posted with a total funding goal of $100,000—a goal that was exceeded in under 24 hours. At the time of this writing, the campaign has raised over $215,000 for the Blooper, further punctuating just how hotly anticipated this new effect is, much to the excitement of the talented crew that's taken a risk to work on it. "We are so happy! The team has put in an incredible amount of work, and it’s so nice to have that validation that this is a thing that people want at this price point."
Chase continued, "There’s always been some uncertainty for us as to the market for Blooper, because in some ways there isn’t anything else out there like it.
"We aren’t just putting out another overdrive or fuzz (where you have some degree of certainty as to how well it will do), but at the same time, we think that is precisely why people like the pedal and care about our brand. We’ve always tried to explore new sonic terrain and we think Blooper might be those representative of that ethos, while still being highly musical, intuitive, and immediately useful."
Some of the most exciting features of the Blooper, according to Chase Bliss, are:
- 40 seconds max loop time (48kHz, 16 bit) with ultra-low-noise hardware / XMOS DSP processor, 32 save-able presets and full undo / redo capability
- 8 layers of undo / redo, unlimited overdubs (oldest layer gets discarded after 8)
- Layers knob to navigate through undo / redo layers
- 6 loop modifiers (quantized & free time/speed changes, scrambler, trimmer, filter and dropper) available over 2 independent channels
- Normal, additive (effects get recorded), and one-shot sampling modes
- Full midi implementation via 1/4" TRS
- Repeats knob for fading loops or to use blooper like a tap-tempo delay
- CV clock sync and modulation control
- Stability control introducing optional tape and warble effects to loop.
- Chase Bliss ramping control (including randomization and ability to sync to loop time)
- Expression control over any parameter either individually or simultaneously
- Dip-switches for customizing behavior: dry kill, straight to overdub, etc.
Though the project is fully funded at this point, fans still have another 25 days left to contribute. As expected, there are multiple rewards tiers: $25 will get backers a Blooper t-shirt, $499 will get them a Blooper pedal, $519 gets a pedal and a t-shirt, $529 for a pedal and a special wooden box, and $549 for everything.
Click here to learn more about the Blooper and support the Kickstarter campaign yourself. The Blooper is scheduled to be released and shipped on December 12.