ocean Machine
If you like sounds that are awash with delay and reverb, Devin Townsend’s new machine might just float your boat...
Reverb and delay pedals are often used together to create atmospheric spacial effects and are usually side by side in a signal chain. Perfect sense, then, to have both together in a single pedal? That’s a thought that must have occurred to Devin Townsend when he asked Mooer to come up with a pedal to suit his own personal needs. The result is the Ocean Machine, which packs two independent delays and a reverb into a single, triple-footswitch housing, complete with 24 preset slots, allowing you to configure combinations of effects arranged in any order. What’s more, it has a looper with 32 MB of memory providing up to 44 seconds of recording time.
Capable of both mono and stereo use, the Ocean Machine takes up the space of three Boss compact pedals, making it a practical pedalboard option, offering three independent effects without cabling between, and with just one power input. It has two modes of operation: it defaults to a standard Play mode to work just like three traditional effects pedals with WYSIWYG operation of the knobs; but a press of the Preset button puts it into Patch mode where you can recall any saved patches and their parameters, stepping through them with the Delay footswitches.
The soft-touch footswitches actually take care of a few functions, delivering plenty of versatility like a master tap tempo or separate tempos for the two delays if you can handle a bit of tap dancing.
In Patch mode, once you have recalled a patch, you can hit two footswitches together to call up Play mode-style operation for the three foot switches so you can individually switch the effects in the patch. Another nice touch is a freeze function where you can hold a switch down to get endless repeats on its related delay or an infinite reverb, adding some frisson to live performance. If you need further control, an external expression pedal can be assigned to control parameters. External switching is also possible either via MIDI or Mooer’s wire les sly connected Air Switches.
SoundS
The two delays each have up to two seconds of delay time and have nine delay types each. Both offer clean digital delay,
plus emulations of a BBD analogue delay and a tape delay. Each then also has a different set of six delay types, making a total of 15 types in all, including several that feature modulation or pitch shifting and some lo-fi distorted options.
The reverb offers nine different types and an independent shimmer effect with a dedicated front panel knob. Those knobs provide the essential parameters, but there are also others accessed via the menu including modulation settings and an optional delay ping-pong effect. The menu is also essential for setting up the effects chain for a preset and it’s easy to move the order of blocks around, including running two delays or a delay and reverb in parallel.
Individually the delays work really well, covering plenty of quirky options including repeats with fuzz and the ‘Rainbow’ delay with bonkers pitchshifting. Likewise, the reverb offers a comprehensive range, although at this price point you don’t get the DSP power and detail of some of the high end units. Hence the spring emulation leaves something to be desired and you probably wouldn’t want to turn up the shimmer too high as the tuning can get a little wayward.
Nevertheless, what you get is a unique pedal with a collection of effects that will do the job just fine for plenty of players. Here it’s all about the context in which it is used: on the one hand it’s an extremely practical way to add two delays and a reverb to your board at a decent price, not least because you can save exact settings for each song in your set. Perhaps more importantly for some players, it also has the quality of being a blank canvas for creativity, its strength lying in being able to combine effects and program composite ambiences to come back to time and again: spacious, evolving or downright bizarre. In short there’s loads to explore.
Verdict
Loads of capability for a sub-£200 street price in a pedal that’s compact enough that it won’t dominate your pedalboard. Pros Three independent effects, programmable patch memory, easy hands-on tweaking, looper, sensibly priced Cons Some pitch-shifted effects can get glitchy; needs 500mAof power