Pigtronix Mothership 2

Fancy a close encounter of the tonal kind? Your transport to some spaced-out sounds has just landed…

We all know about guitar synths by now: a hexaphonic pickup fixed to your guitar connecting to an external unit with MIDI will give you access to any sound you like. But there is also the other genre of guitar synths: those that come in a stompbox and allow you to just plug any guitar directly in and get a more focused, but limited, range of synth sounds from the output.

The original Pigtronix Mothership, first seen about nine years ago, was one of the latter. But now the US company has introduced its successor, the Mothership 2, which moves the show onwards thanks to advances in technology, and allows them to make the claim that it has the world’s fastest pitch-tracking circuit. It is much more compact and pedalboard-friendly than the original too, partly because it utilises dual concentric knobs to adjust 10 parameters.

The Mothership 2 is a monophonic, three-voice synth. This means you can only play one note at a time, but the resulting synth sound is constructed from three oscillators that can be mixed in proportion from the pedal’s top row of knobs. There’s VCO (triangle wave) and square wave voices, plus a sub-octave sine-wave voice – this sub is designed to get trouser-flappingly low, which may be a bit much for some guitar amp speakers, so you get the option of sending it from a separate output on the pedal. Sticking a jack into the sub output separates it from the main signal. You can choose to have synth sound only or can mix your dry guitar sound in proportion with it.

SoundS

When you’ve combined the voices and found a basic sound you like, you have three choices (via a toggle switch) of setting a pitch for it. It can be an octave above your guitar sound, in unison with it or set manually at an interval (Maj 3rd, 4th, 5th) with the Tune knob. That knob is also active in Octave and Unison modes, as you need to set it to match your guitar’s pitch – it’s meant to be in tune at 12 o’clock, but setting small dual concentric knobs is a bit fiddly and, although there’s a clearly marked spot on the inner knob, it’s hard to see the outer one, so tuning by ear is necessary.