ARIGATO

Caroline Guitar's "ARIGATO" neither seeks to recapture the sounds of the past, nor to be state of the art. It is a snapshot of a future we were promised as children.

While capable of the airy psychedelia of classic units, this one is meant to rumble, wobble, shake, rattle, and roar. It is also capable of going fully wet for interesting vibrato sounds, max out feedback for auto wah style filter sweeps, and a wide range of responsive shades throughout each control as they interact with the others.

We’re pretty excited about this release; the first pedal Philippe ever owned was a phaser, and getting to make this feels like a homecoming.

Your pedal was dreamed, designed and created at our small batch distortery™ in Columbia, S.C. Thank you for supporting our work, and putting it to good use for yours.

Designer’s notes: if you and your customers have enjoyed our SOMERSAULT™ lo-fi modulator, then I think you’ll really enjoy ARIGATO. It’s built on a similar framework: an analog LFO that can do some wild stuff and push things beyond their boundaries, a mix control that can go 100% wet, and a havoc control that is all gas, no brakes.

It’s an OTA based analog phaser but with a couple twists – the mode switch changes the capacitors and filter notches to more closely resemble a classic vibe pedal, giving the sweep a bit of an off-balance feel. The bypass on ARIGATO can also be a momentary bypass for instant phasing “hits” and releases. And the square wave, like the Somersault’s, can push the phasing into audible pumps and overload things. We could have tamed it for noise purposes, but we didn’t want to lose the fun.

With this pedal we recommend starting with everything at 12:00 – “true north” as we’re fond of calling it – and then adjusting from there to discover how each control interacts with the others.