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Alexander Defender Stargate Drive


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The Defender is a bold new take at digital drive combined with some really fun effects that compliment these outlandish drive sounds with features to match.  Forget digital emulation, forget the fact that on the "OD" setting the untrained ear may well think this is an analog drive.  This is not about competing with all of the best analog circuits for the natural beauty in drive sounds that they offer.  No no, this is a straight shot at some of the most raucous, overly manipulated, overly controllable digital drive techniques that people love to hate and will love to own even more.

Aside from varying degrees of digital gain (overdrive, distortion and fuzz) the Defender offers 3 fx settings that pair with the drive sounds perfectly.  Space (SPC) offers a very short delay time from 0 to 40 seconds which offers everything from barely there dimension to double-tracking to fast slapback.  Pitch (PIT) offers mixable octave down and up options.  Filter offers several parameters to surgically tamper with the eq profile to allow for all kinds of wah and synthlike sounds. 

All of these FX are commanded by the WARP footswitch which can "morph" between two different knob settings on command (creating new effects in itself like manual flange with the Space mode) and of course as a NEO series pedal, all settings can be assigned as presets and controlled via expression and MIDI. 

Technical Details

LEVEL - Adjusts the overall output level of the Defender. The pedal has quite a bit of volume on tap, enough to overdrive your amp even with Drive at minimum.

DRIVE - Controls the amount of drive, saturation, and distortion of the effect.

(WARP) - Adjusts the speed of the WARP control. With this control at minimum the Defender will warp between the red and blue settings instantly. With the control at maximum the pedal will take approximately 10 seconds to warp.

LIGHT - Controls the treble or brightness of the distortion effect or the cutoff frequency of the filter if FLT is selected.

(BLEND) - Mixes the clean signal (fully counter-clockwise) with the distorted signal (fully clockwise). This is a really crucial control for using the Defenderwith bass or low-tuned guitars, allowing you to dial in some clean signal to increase the articulation. 

MATTER - Controls the bass or depth of the distorted tone or the resonance / feedback of the filter if FLT is selected.

(TWEAK) - Adjusts the special effect for each distortion mode. Varies for each effect, check out the descriptions below!

Select Button - Tap to choose a new effect mode or hold to engage the ALT controls:

The upper LED shows the distortion effect selection.

OD - Overdrive with a clear midrange character. This mode ranges from transparent to gritty with a sweep of the Drive knob. Try this mode with the Blend control near noon for a great soft-clipping boost.

DST - Distortion with a darker, smoother tone. Gets hairy really quickly and loves to party.

FZ - Splattery, sizzly fuzz tone. Don’t even bother trying to get this one to clean up, it sounds kind of like a toy robot being fed into a garbage disposal.

Once you’ve selected your distortion, you can choose from one of three special effects. Any distortion effect may be combined with any special effect. Please note that the special effects only work on the distorted sound, and not on the clean blend signal.

PIT - Polyphonic octave shifting, applied to the distortion signal only. The Tweak control adjusts the blend between octave down, distortion, and octave up. This effect is killer for sub-octave riffing or screaming fuzz freakouts.

SPC - Space modulation using a short time delay on the distortion signal. Tweak controls the delay time from zero to a short slap-back. Try using the Warp function to sweep the delay time for manual flanger sounds.

FLT - Super-tweakable resonant lowpass filter, ideal for synth or wah textures. Light controls the cutoff frequency and Matter controls the resonance or sharpness of the filter. Tweak mixes between the filtered sound and the unfiltered sound.


    Brand: Alexander Pedals

    SKU: ALEXANDER-DEF



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