This all‑analogue affair takes modulation well beyond the bread‑and‑butter chorus and flanger effects.

With a background in aviation electronics, Pete Hamstead came to the guitar world with different ideas from most designers, but arguably his most important was to design analogue amps that boast much better noise performance than the classics, and his recipe works: I’ve played through a couple of their amps and as well as kicking out a great tone, they’re whisper‑quiet in terms of noise — to the extent that when not playing through it, you really wouldn’t know the amp was on!

Red Lines

This is all achieved through component choice and skilled circuit design (as opposed, for example, to any noise‑supression processing such as expansion). Naturally, Hamstead soon went on to bring his expertise to bear on analogue stompbox design, and we’ve already been impressed by a couple of his designs: the Signature Analogue Tremolo (reviewed in SOS July 2016) and the Odyssey multi‑mode analogue overdrive (SOS August 2018).

Now, in collaboration with the team behind That Pedal Show, Hamstead have returned with a larger, more ambitious pedal called the Redwing. But although billed as an analogue ‘stereo modulation pedal’, that description doesn’t really convey its full scope. It features two bucket‑brigade delay (BBD) lines that are used in various ways to bring us a whole smörgåsbord of tasty effects, ranging from chorus, vibrato and flanging, to a sort of rotary‑speaker emulation and even ring‑mod‑like textures.

As you might expect of Hamstead, they’ve taken an analogue purist’s approach: the signal path and the controls are entirely analogue, and that’s a decision that has pros and cons. In the pros column, the sound is great, the technical performance is superb, with vanishingly low noise levels, and the controls are every bit as immediate and intuitive as you’d expect of a decent analogue pedal. As for the cons, there’s no MIDI, no tempo sync, and no preset switching system. For some, that last one could well prove a deal‑breaker, simply because this pedal is capable of performing so many different duties, and for playing a set on stage I’d tend to view it as a single‑purpose pedal, even if that purpose might vary from show to show. The sound and versatility definitely appeal, though, and at home and in the studio, you obviously have more time to dial in your settings and experiment.

Form &…