Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing review: a weird and wonderful ‘liminal’ delay
£299 / $299, oldbloodnoise.com
By this point, digital signal processing is a world of basically infinite possibilities – we’ve reached the guitar equivalent of when old tech journalists would sit atop piles of phone books to demonstrate the data storage capacities of a 32mb floppy. Multi-effects units, big-box delays and reverbs let you create virtual signal chains that would otherwise require a whole warehouse’s worth of analogue guitar pedals.
READ MORE: Gamechanger Audio Auto Chorus review – do you need dynamic modulation in your life?
But as enticing as those endless options can be, they can also be creative poison. One brand that’s been particularly good at balancing the genuine power that digital allows with a healthy dollop of much-needed limitation is Old Blood Noise Endeavours – always pretty forward looking, its latest release promises to be a new kind of effect – a ‘liminal’ delay. Here I’d normally use the phrase “let’s dive in”, and while I am trying to vary that up, this pedal is ultimately called the Bathing, so… let’s dive in.
Image: Press
Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing – what is it?
Depending on what corners of the internet you’ve frequented over the last few years, you may have a very different relationship to the world liminal. In modern parlance it often refers to an aesthetic trend that’s concerned mostly with abandoned hotel pools, snowed-over petrol stations and those little plastic chairs you used to get at McDonald’s. Whereas the Bathing’s take on the concept is a little more true to the more general, magical sense of in-betweenness that ‘liminal’ has historically evoked.
Its artwork isn’t a grainy digital photograph of a playpen, but is instead a gorgeous illustration that to me evokes the clean lines and abandoned fantasy visuals of something like Hyper Light Drifter.
So how does that translate sonically? What is the Bathing ‘between’? Technically, it’s between a delay, a phaser and a reverb. Its signal path consists of a digital delay that gets modulated in several complex ways by a resonant LFO in the feedback loop. The LFO control is pretty in-depth, and there’s a good deal of stereo functionality and some extra pitch-modulation if you need things to get even more wobbly.
Image: Press
Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing – build quality and usability
The Bathing is housed in Old Blood’s newest enclosure format – it’s a slightly sloped bent-steel enclosure with an interesting sort of overhang on the front side. It’s a pretty nice layout – it’s wide, but by no means a “big box reverb” kind of size. The important thing is that the bypass and tap-tempo switches have enough room to be hit individually. The layout also lets the pedal art really shine, leaving a big space in the centre for the illustration – OBNE’s aesthetics have, of course, always been a strong point, and this is a truly gorgeous addition to any pedalboard.
That’s not to say it’s a perfect layout – while most of the build is present and correct, with nicely knurled knobs, the controls for the dry/wet mixes and the depth of the chorus are PCB-mount mini pots – the ones that are a little fiddly and much less of a joy to turn. The LFO wave selector is also quite frustrating to use, as it has a continuous action as you rotate it, despite the fact it selects from a set number of discrete settings. A selector switch would, for me, be a better choice here to give clearer feedback on which LFO you have selected.
The I/O layout is also worth calling attention to. It is a stereo pedal, and it can work fully mono, fully stereo or in MISO – mono in, stereo out. The stereo connections are accessed via TRS, which saves a little space on the back panel and allows for all of the I/O (expression jack and MIDI included) to be in one place. Nice in some ways, but it does mean the stereo-inclined will have to find some slightly more idiosyncratic patch connectors. The ins and outs are also relatively close together – not insanely so, but it does make it harder to use pancake-style connectors with the pedal.
Image: Press
Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing – sounds
When you pitch a pedal as a unique, new type of effect, it’s always a pretty bold claim. However, my expectations as to what the Bathing would sound like were well and truly drowned after a few minutes of use – because these few minutes of use quickly spiralled into a few hours of noodling before I noticed where the time was going. Which is to say, the Bathing is indeed pretty unique and intriguing.
Thanks to how the feedbacking modulation works, your notes are fairly quickly filtered again and again into very modulated echoes. Depending on the position of the filter knob, you can wash your repeats out into underwater bassiness or sharpen them into walkie-talkie crackle – or leave it in the middle for a slightly more neutral sound.
The function of the LFO is interesting. When the delay time is short, the resultant effect on the repeats is pretty much in the world of phase/flange. Things can get pretty resonant, making me thankful for that filter knob on the more extreme settings. The LFO also has a huge frequency range – you can literally stop it dead at position zero, and it goes all the way up to audio-frequency, ring-mod levels on max. The wave shapes are also very impactful, ranging from a standard sine to disorienting sawtooths. There are even envelope-activated ramps, although I find these a little unwieldy.
When you set the delay time longer, the LFO starts to pull your repeated signal apart, leading to cascading, marble-down-a-metal-staircase sounds. Delay repeats phase totally outwards from themselves, orbiting the main delay time with clattering extra repeats. You can adjust the intensity of this aspect of the sound with both the depth and the stages control – the depth adjusting how far out they go, the stages adjusting how many there are.
Individual dry and wet controls are very much appreciated here – due to just how weird and abstract the effect is, it’s both cool to isolate it for some total echoey strangeness, and mix it in more subtly if I don’t want it to totally overtake my playing. Relatedly, the added dimension control creates a warbling vibrato in mono mode (one side is left un-vibratoed in stereo for a chorus effect) that helps the wet signal sit “around” your dry signal. The Bathing does excel at providing a wash of weirdness behind some spacious playing, but with the settings cranked to their extremes and you’ve got sounds that barely resemble a guitar at all.
Image: Press
Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing – should I buy one?
So back to liminality. With pedals like this, there does seem to be two extremes of approach – either total lo-fi signal crush that makes your delay repeats sound like they’re coming back via an emergency telephone line, or the kind of total expansiveness that stretches single notes out into entire Brian Eno albums. The Bathing, appropriately enough, is between those two approaches – there is a degree of expansiveness going on, but you’d be hard pressed to call it lush or particularly ‘ambient’ in a traditional sense. It’s too sharp a sound for wide droning pads. However, its ear-catching character is still not totally summed up by just “lo-fi delay” either.
In all, idiosyncratic effects like this don’t come with simple “definitely buy it” recommendations. Will it fill a basic slot in your ‘board if you just want some echo? Not really, but that’s obviously not a mark against it. The best pedals in this genre transcend traditional use-cases as well as traditional sounds – and so if you’re the kind of player that wants to take a trip down to the weird, moving waters of the Bathing, you’ve hopefully already been persuaded if it’s for you or not.
Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing – alternatives
While there’s not a glut of other liminal delays out there to recommend, there are plenty of effects that take a similar approach to weirding the digital delay format. There’s the sort-of-delay, sort-of-looper Chase Bliss Habit ($339), the more aggressively strange Death By Audio Echo Dream 2 ($280 / £269), and EarthQuaker’s revived Disaster Transport Sr, which I actually found myself reminded of a lot with the Bathing thanks to the wobbly multi-delay sounds.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
