12 of the Best Envelope Filter Pedals - 2018 Edition

I have caught various demos and reviews of this pedal, including on a fairly recent That Pedal Show episode, and every time I hear it, it sounds fantastic. You know with Mike Piera that you are going to get amazing tone, and he updates and improves the original MXR pedal in every way - with a significantly re-designed circuit with some super extras. Instead of the original 2 controls dials, you get a 3rd Emphasis / sort of bias dial as such which ramps up the quack of the filter, then you get a two - way toggle which allows you to switch the filter sweep between up and down pass modes. This is a really cool filter pedal, available in strictly limited quantities and usually involves a waiting list - reasonably priced though for the extra features.

Evil Filter is a combination of Octave Fuzz and Envelope / Resonant filter. For the Fuzz you can select level and whether square or sine wave, you also have a footswitch to toggle the fuzz on/off. For Filter you have 4 dials - Frequency | Output | Waveform | Resonance - with High/Normal Resonance toggle. This delivers some really gnarly and sinister 70's funk fuzz tones - a touch specialist perhaps but really good.

If 'Knobs' features you, you know you're quirky cool and this Envelope Filter has a really impressive range of tones - with so many different ways to modulate the filtering. The pedal features 7 dials - Frequency | Resonance | Depth | Master | Rate | Shape | Speed, State toggle - High/Band/Low Pass, and Scramble toggle (Sample & Hold). The above Knobs video is the perfect introduction.

A dual resonant filter with individual Intensity | Resonance | Mix dials for A + B filters and master control dials for Rate | Direct | Frequency. This pedal gives you somewhat spacey phasey sounds with some lovely warble as you turn up the Rate dial. It's a cool pedal for sure, but quite larger really for what it delivers in my opinion.

One of the best-loved envelope filters, and as used by John Mayer on many occasion. Has a 4-mode dial - Low/Band/High Pass and Mix. then separate Response | Range | Peak | Gain | Boost dials and a Sweep Up/Down toggle. Gives you all the funk you need, and has been the industry standard big-box filter pedal for a while. It's not as specialist as some of these others, but covers off all the obvious areas well.

Another funk-focused pedals - well demoed for various bass modes above. It features a 5-mode Dial - Notch Filter | High Pass | Band Pass | Low Pass | No Filter, then Boost | Gain | Attack | Mix | Peak (Resonance) - and Low/High Range and Down/Up Drive toggles. The cool thing about this pedal is that you can select 'No Filter' mode and just use it as a boost - with our without gain.

This is currently my front-runner for filter pedal - I obviously really like the Subdecay Prometheus DLX too, but don't really have space for more than a compact format pedal, so a miniaturisation of the legendary Mu-tron III is the way to go. You get all the same features - Low Pass, High Pass, Band Pass, High and Low Range, and the really cool thing here is the separate footswitch to change direction on the filter sweep - Up/Down. This really is the pedal to get, the first batch was released in August of last year, but sold out in double-quick time. The occasional one appears on Reverb.com now and again at inflated price. I and many others are waiting for Mike Beigel to push the button on the second batch of manufacture.

I've already mentioned this hybrid pedal before - which combines the best of phasing and filtering in a single workstation. In truth it is rather more a phase shifter than a filter pedal, but that phasing can be controlled by Envelope, LFO or a blend of the two. You have a series of 5 dials and five toggles which allow you to sculpt the texture of the phasing, smooth it out, make it more staccato, invert, accentuate and ramp up the resonance. You also have a variety of pedal controls to impact filter trigger, sweep and speed. It's quite different to the other pedals featured here and gives you something pretty cool and unique.

Most of the pedals featured here are kind of large, this for me therefore is the best compromise therefore of form and function in the most compact - medium size enclosure. You have 4 smaller dials - Warp | Frequency | Depth | Resonance, two large 11 position mode dials - one for Wave Shape and one for Mode, then a 3-way toggle for Low/Band/High Pass. There is also a second footswitch for Tap-tempo and Sample/Hold. If I was in the market for any of these - this would be my go-to!

If for whatever reason I am unable to track down a Micro-Tron III then this would be my second choice - it has all the same functionality with and additional Mid-range Frequency setting too, yet vs the Micro-Tron has a toggle for the Up/Down sweep selection instead of a separate footswitch which would be my personal preference. This one sounds and works great, it is alas not currently available - having been discontinued, but versions do occasionally show up on Ebay and Reverb.com. It's yet another superb VFE pedal - as you can hear in the above Mike Herman's demo. I'm a touch sad really that so many great VFE pedals have been discontinued.

I've featured this pedal before in my '16 Weird and Wonderful Guitar Noise Pedals' piece - this is likely the most full-featured of the filter workstations with a whole plethora of tone-sculpting abilities by way of a 9 socket CV Patch Bay, 9 Dials - Attack | Threshold | Envelope Amount | Resonance | Frequency | LFO Rate | LFO Amount | Compression | Dry/Wet, built-in LFO, 4 filter modes - Notch Down | High Pass | Band Pass | Low Pass. Dennis Kayzer gives you another superb demo of the kind of sounds this pedal is capable of - probably my favourite of the big boxes on show here.