Guitar Gear

For those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80’s, analog synthesizers were de rigueur to the music of the day. One of the most popular synths was the Prophet 5. I used to use a Yamaha DX-7, but there were some totally cool analog synths back then.

Back in college in the early ’80’s, a friend of mine had a Prophet 5 and I remember spending several hours twiddling knobs and getting some insanely cool sounds.

I always thought that it would be totally cool to be able to control a synth from a guitar, and lo and behold, by the ’90’s some guitars had built-in MIDI tracking (they weren’t very good), and others came equipped with a mini-DIN jack to hook up to an external synth. Godin makes a line of guitars that have that today (Daryl Stuermer of Genesis uses one). But that’s kind of a specialized kind of thing. My wish was to be able to plug into a synth with a 1/4″ plug. No fuss, no muss… Something like that could just sit on my pedal board.

My wish came true the other day when I got advance notice of the newly announced Pigtronix Resotron just officially released today, the first day of NAMM. Here’s the video I shared yesterday:

I’ve never been into things like bit crushers and other kinds of envelope filters, but I have always loved the sound of an analog synth. That Pigtronix has put one into a pedal using the same chip as the Prophet 5 and is the size of a standard pedal is… well… KICK-ASS!

I think the pedal is available now directly from Pigtronix. It goes for $249. This is one I’m definitely going to check out!