Making it rain

Intellijel teamed up with Cylonix for the Rainmaker, a rack unit of complex delays and comb resonator action

Cylonix and Intellijel teamed up a few years ago to make the updated version of the Cyclebox, and since then, the two have developed their digital oscillator ideas with the Shapeshifter, and created complex and immediate delays with the Rainmaker.

Simply plugging in your audio inputs into the Rainmaker and tapping the audio outputs allows a range of controls and sonic exploration right on the front panel. At its core, the Rainmaker is a 16-tap stereo spectral rhythm delay and comb resonator, but in simpler terms it’s a big bundle of audio awesomeness! The digital processing runs at 96kHz and 32-bit, allowing plenty of headroom and a high-quality sheen not always found in other effects hardware.

The module is split into two distinct sections: a stereo delay and a stereo comb resonator. The delay section has 16 taps, each with its own resonant filter and granular pitchshifter. The delay also has its own feedback level and low-pass/ high-pass tone control for the feedback path, and features tap delay times from 0.1 millisecond to 20 seconds.

The stereo comb resonator, meanwhile, has 64 time-delayed taps that are summed together to create a deep comb filter or resonator effect. Short delay times in the comb resonator create a Karplus-Strong plucked string sound, and you can trigger internal noise bursts to play this as a synth voice on its own. There’s also plenty of CV inputs, including for delay feedback, pitchshift and feedback filtering. Deeper editing allows chord effects or echoing pitch sequences as you stack delay taps with different pitchshifts.