Swirls consists of three effects; a Tri-Stereo Chorus emulation, a micro pitch-shifter effect and an aggressive, VCA-style compressor.
This particular stack of effects has become rather famous, and probably best known from Michael Landau's seminal album, Tales from the Bulge. In the 80s, big racks were all the rage, and guitarists would frequently stack effects in parallel to add more "thickness" to their sound. But this usually required multiple rack units and complex wiring systems to accomplish, with the end result being the size of an average fridge.
Swirls intends to give you the distilled essence of this specific sound, without the need for a loading dolly to transport all your gear.
The chorus is a fairly accurate emulation of the Dyno-my-piano Tri-Stereo chorus, but we tuned it against a Fulltone TERC unit, which is a more modern, but fully analog and authentic recreation of the original design.
The pitch shifter is based on the classic synchronous overlap-add methodology, used in units from Eventide, Digitech and many others, who have offered similar effect in the past. It produces a thick, chorus-like sound, but without the movement of a traditional chorus, caused by the low frequency oscillators used to modulate the signal in a chorus unit.
Finally, we have the compressor. It's a very fast and aggressive, feed-forward, RMS-detection design, loosely based on the dbx 160x. the compressor sits in front of the chorus and pitch shifter, and adds that signature "pop" to the sound, especially noticeable when playing a strat in the second position.
If the compressor is disabled (Ratio set to lowest setting) the pedal jumps into "analog dry-thru mode", sending the dry signal directly to the output, for zero latency and reduced noise.
Note - as of March 2026, we have re-labelled the left footswitch as "A/B", whereas it was previously labelled "Preset". This is to avoid confusion between the footswitch and the "Preset" toggle switch. Older units have the footswitch labelled as Preset, but the functionality of the switch has not changed at all, only the label on the front panel has been changed.