TC Electronic Corona
February 2011 Guitarist 119
£105, £105, £105 & £125
EFFECTS
TC Electronic
Shaker, Vortex, Corona
& Flashback
£105, £105, £105 & £125
A new range of stompers that offer the signature sounds of
some well-known players by Trevor Curwen
D
enmark’s TC Electronic
is an effects legend. The
last few years have seen
the brand branching out into an
innovative range of floor- and
pedal-based products, including
the genre-changing PolyTune
pedal tuner and the successful
Nova series stompboxes. The
Novas can be quite complex
in operation, however, with
scrolling memories, double
footswitches, 12V power and so
on, so the company has now
launched a new range of pedals
that are very much the opposite.
Here we’re talking straight-up,
simple stompboxes. We have
the first four – there are reverb,
distortion and overdrive to come.
You get a compact digital
pedal that can run from a 9V
battery or DC adaptor. Battery
access is by removing the pedal
baseplate via a large chromed
knurled screw that needs a
coin or screwdriver to initially
loosen it. Inside, there’s a pair of
DIP switches – one that selects
a high quality buffer rather
than the default true bypass
switching mode (which is
useful if the pedal is at the start
or end of a long chain) and a
second that offers dry kill for
effect only, when the pedal is to
be used in an amp’s FX loop.
The default setting is for
analogue dry through signal,
where the dry part of the signal
isn’t converted and passes
through the pedal at all times,
even when the effect is active.
Each pedal has four knobs (one
of which is a rotary switch in
the case of the delay) plus a
three-way switch and features
selectable effects variations.
In designing these pedals TC
wanted something that was
fast, easy and intuitive to use,
with the ability to change
sounds on the f ly with a few
knob tweaks. However, it was
also aware that most
stompboxes have a core sound –
a basic tonality that’s purely
their own. Something that’s
fine if you like it, but that you’re
also unable to change if you
grow tired of it. With this in
mind it set about building in
a feature to allow access to a
number of alternative sounds.
This feature is called
TonePrint: each pedal has a
USB connection that allows you
to import a new sound, a
custom ‘tuning’ of the pedal,
from a computer and store it in
a special onboard memory slot
called up by the TonePrint
position of the pedal’s
three-way switch (or the rotary
switch in the case of the delay).
TC has made a number of
these alternative ‘tunings’
available for each pedal, all
easily accessed and
downloaded into it from a
special TonePrint website. And
these aren’t just voicings
created by some Scandinavian
boffin in a white lab coat…
In designing these pedals TC wanted something that was
fast, easy and intuitive to use, with the ability to change
sounds on the fl y with a few knob tweaks
Instead, TC has asked a
bunch of the world’s best guitar
players to make TonePrints for
the pedals. The company has
given them a specially
developed tuning software that
allows them to tweak every
single aspect of the pedals –
parameter settings, what range
the pots should have, what the
min-mid-max values should be,
and so on, to make their own
perfect pedal. All of these Artist
TonePrints will be available for
loading into the pedals.
For starters, among others
Steve Morse, Doug Aldrich,
Orianthi and Joe Perry have
done TonePrints for the delay
pedal, while for the Chorus you
have the likes of John Petrucci,
Richard Kruspe and
Bumblefoot putting in their 10
cents. What’s more, by the time
the pedals get their official
launch at the 2011 NAMM show
next month, more artists will
have been signed up.
Shaker vibrato
The first position of the
Shaker’s three-way switch
offers vibrato that can be
turned on and off with the
footswitch, but there’s also a
latch position, which allows the
footswitch to apply the vibrato
effect as long as you hold it
down. As is also the case with
the flanger and chorus pedals
in this series, the central
position of the three-way
GIT338.rev_tc 119 12/22/10 5:09:28 PM