swan hunter pedal The Swan Hunter

The Swan Hunter covers everything from warm analogue style slapback like repeats and clean belton brick reverb, to wibbly tape echo and oscillating reverb, through to super lofi fuzzy noise chaos. Both echo and reverb have a ducking / expansion control so they react to your playing dynamics creating some unique gating effects. 

For the reverb (top row) we have…

confluence – Blends between putting the reverb in parallel or series with the echo. When in series the reverb is after the echo.

fog – Feedback control (this gives the reverb longer tails and around 3 o’clock puts it into oscillation territory.

brake/ break (left footswitch) – The second footswitch has two functions. When the confluence knob is fully anticlockwise (echo and reverb in parallel) it functions silently as a brake to slow down the oscillations from the fog control.

The second function (break) is lofi and noisy, and is related to the fore / aft, ballast and confluence controls (see below).

fore / aft (three way switch) – Makes the reverb duck or gate at more extreme settings. Up is ‘fore’, meaning the reverb can be heard when you play, but when you stop playing it will drop in volume. The down position is ‘aft’ which means the opposite will happen. The reverb will duck when you play and come in when you stop. Middle position is off.

ballast – Sensitivity for the fore / aft control. Fully anti clockwise means that the reverb will hardly duck at all. Fully clockwise means that it will gate pretty sharply.

The break function of the second footswitch works in combination with fore / aft, ballast and confluence.

Pressing the footswitch will give you a lovely noisy lofi fuzzy grumble of some description depending on what’s happening with the other controls. It’s all highly interactive.

fret (three way switch) – Low pass filter tone switch.

For the echo (bottom row) there is…

history – Delay time (analogue style). This sound is warm gritty lofi, repeats are straight. This control allows the delay time to be pushed beyond what the chip was designed to do, so it gets grittier and more lofi the longer you make the delay time.

haunt – Echo feedback (repeats). The feedback loop for the echo is designed to get to the brink of oscillation but never go too far over.

fore / aft (three way switch) – duck/ gate effect. Up (fore) means the echo can be heard whilst you play and then gates when you stop playing. Down (aft) means it gates when you’re playing and comes through when you stop. Middle position is off.

ballast – Sensitivity of fore / aft. Fully anticlockwise – very little ducking. Fully clockwise – harder gating.

fret (three way switch) – Low pass filter switch. In the top position it lets everything through including all the noise and tape like hiss, the middle position cuts a bunch of that out, and the bottom position is for particularly warm repeats.

memory – Delay time (tape echo style). These are wibbly tape like repeats. Well, repeats might be a strong word. This control dictates the amount of wibble, so it can be combined with the history control to just add a little bit of character to otherwise steady repeats.

fx loop – Without anything in the fx loop send and return the feedback loop is connected. The ‘send’ of the fx loop is a shunt jack, so once you plug something in there it breaks the feedback loop, meaning the echo feedback control (haunt) won’t do anything and you’ll only ever be able to hear a single echo. When you plug the ‘out’ of the pedal into the ‘return’ of the fx loop, your feedback loop is complete again and can be controlled by the haunt knob.

dry, reverb and echo each have their own volume controls (white knobs).