Layered Distortion & Sonic Chaos. Is the OBNE Beam Splitter Your Next Pedal?

The Beam Splitter by Old Blood Noise Endeavors is a multi-dimensional approach to distortion, an epic experimental effects pedal that offers amazing and huge sounds.

If you're a guitarist looking for new sounds that add depth, and pushes creative boundaries, then the Beam Splitter could sit right at home in your rig.

Essentially, it's a three-way signal-splitting distortion pedal; a sonic laboratory if you will, for those who crave something unique and textured, with the potential for huge sounding controlled chaos!

With Beam Splitter, you'll get to harness its true power starting via its 3 distortion flavours, purple, green and blue. 

Purple is a hard clipping, compressed, distortion sound, and as the gain goes up, it accentuates the mids and highs while adding distortion.

Green is a soft clipping overdrive, and with gain low it acts kind of like a clean boost, but as the gain rolls up it gets into the realms of medium gain overdrive.

Blue is a transistor overdrive that sits somewhere in between green and purple.

Now the fun really begins.

At its core, the Beam Splitter takes simple distortion and expands it into three independent signal paths. Instead of processing your guitar through a single circuit, this pedal splits your input into three separate signals (the purple, green and blue), which of course have their own distortion and drive character. Two of these paths (green and blue) feature delay and decay controls, allowing for cascading, intense and evolving textures that create an immersive soundscape and huge sounds.

The design of Beam Splitter means you can run your signal in parallel mono for a rich, layered sound, or even send each split signal separately to a different amp, effect chain, or mixing console for true multi-dimensional processing, which adds cool separation, and unpredictability, unlocking endless creative potential.

Of course, you have the ability to only roll the volume up on one distortion flavour, or 2, or all 3, and each also has its own unique gain knob to dial in for those independent signals. 

But whichever way you go, Beam Splitter has the potential to sound huge. 

The delay functions on the green and blue paths can add so much depth to your sound by choosing the amount of delay time added to each.  So if you decide to have each one lagging at different times behind the main core signal (purple), suddenly it's a massive sound - like you've been joined by more guitarists!

With the ability to also change the feedback repeats of the delay with the Decay knob, or set the amount of random variation of the delays with the Deviate knob, you'll begin to also find strange filters, flangers, lo-fi vibratos, and trailing slap-back echoes in your sound, and a more realistic sense of more than just one person playing.

Old Blood Noise Endeavors (OBNE for short, but you probably knew that!) make some of most innovative, premium grade, unique effects available to us guitarists today, so if you love massive walls of sound with evolving distortion textures, then Beam Splitter will give you that unparalleled depth.

As with all OBNE, Beam Splitter is a studio-grade clarity and reliable tool, whether on stage or in the studio, so if you're looking for a way to push your rig into new sonic territories, then it's solid mix of distortion, delay, and phase manipulation capabilities will offer you endless creative potential.

I love it, and I think you will too, plus who doesn't love a huge sound!


Haven't tried the Beam Splitter yet? I can't recommend it enough. Give it a go and discover a whole new world of sound.

We'd love to hear about your Beam Splitter experience! Drop a comment below and tell us how it's transformed your setup.

Thanks for being part of our FX Pedal Brotherhood. Your support means the world to us! And remember, we're always here, ready to help you elevate your sound.

Much love,
Paul

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