In a departure from their range of overdrive and fuzz pedals, Great Eastern FX Co. have announced the availability of the XO Variable Crossover, a new pedal that has been designed to provides users with a way of extracting new sounds from their existing pedals.
As you may have guessed, the new unit revolves around an active crossover that splits the input signal into separate high- and low-frequency bands. Each band is then routed to its own independent effects loops before being mixed back together at the pedal’s output. As a result, XO can be used to apply effects to limited parts of an instrument’s frequency range, allowing for a huge amount of experimental possibilities such as blending different ‘flavours’ of overdrives, combining modulation effects running at different rates, or applying two entirely different effects to each band. It’s also possible to ignore the return connectors completely and use the pedal to send each band to its own dedicated amplifier.
“When we describe some of the sounds and combinations of effects that are possible with the XO, they can be hard to imagine. These are things that most of us have simply never tried to do before. We’re used to thinking about effects in terms of pedal order and wet/dry mix, perhaps even left and right in a stereo setup, but thinking in terms of low and high frequencies is really a new frontier. Once you start playing with the XO, it’s such a fun and inspiring device to experiment with. We’re still finding new ways to use the pedal and we fully expect to be surprised by what our users come up with. You can get into some pretty far-out and experimental territory with it, but the XO is also a really powerful tool for tweaking and refining more conventional sounds. And for bass, the ability to process the high and low frequencies separately means that no guitar pedal is off limits any more.” - David Greeves, founder of Great Eastern FX Co.
Along with its collection of six quarter-inch TS sockets, the pedal is equipped with a selection of useful controls. A Crossover Freq knob determines the split point, with a range switch toggling between a pair of ranges tailored for guitar and bass (300Hz – 3.4kHz for the former and 50 – 600 Hz for the latter), with a Return Balance control offering adjustment of the relative level between the two returns and a Dry Blend parameter providing an overall wet/dry control.
Some handy extras include a button that can be used to reverse the bands’ relative polarity, and another that makes it possible to re-route the pedals inserted in the high band loop to the low band and vice versa. Another neat side-effect is that with no pedals connected to the loops, the Return Balance control effectively functions as a tilt EQ, with the added benefit of being able to set its centre frequency using the Crossover Freq knob.
Pricing & Availability
XO Variable Crossover is available now, priced at $279£229 including VAT / €279.
