Cosmodio Instruments' new Gravity Well release intriguingly meshes together Wavefolding and Multi-Waveform Amplitude Tremolo

Since my acquisition of Kinotone’s Sparks a few weeks ago, it turns out I’m now quite familiar with Wavefolding Distortion - which is a big part of this new device. In fact on the Sparks you can modulate that distortion too via LFO and Envelope Filtering, while you don’t have access to 8 different waveforms you get on the Gravity Well.

I guess for the Gravity Well the two key ’blending’ controls here are Volume and Depth - where overall it’s a pretty simple topology, with independent channels, and some additional tone and voicing shaping.

Controls - TREMOLO } Waveform : Sawtooth / Ramp Up / Square / Triangle / Sine / Swoop / Sample-and-Hold / Random, Flow : Trem > Wavefold / Wavefold > Trem, Tremolo Depth, Tremolo Footswitch; WAVEFOLDER } Voice : Volume, Voice : Focused / Full Range / Clean-Blended, Tone : Dark / Balanced / Bright, Wavefolder Gain, Wavefolder Footswitch.

In fact there was a third Wavefolding device out recently too - in the guise of the Noise Engineering Dystorpia - there in combination with rectifier distortion and octaves. For the Gravity Well it’s kind of a melting pot of waveforms - some with their peaks folded into themselves, and others more conventionally amplitude LFO modulated.

In many ways the Kinotone Sparks does a similar thing to the Gravity Well, but in a somewhat different manner. The Gravity Well is certainly a far more straightforward effect and seems pretty intuitive to me.

It’s good to see that Cosmodio Instruments followed up its quirky Pet Yeti Bitcrushed Fuzz / Distoriton with another adventurous release. Albeit we now seem to be going through something of a wave of wavfolding - it’s still very much a little known effect - and players will need to acclimatise to that different texture and its musical possibilities. It’s much more common on the synth side of things.

The skill here is going to be in balancing up the Volume of the Wavefolder with the Depth of the Tremolo - for optimal musical output.

This pedal is every much in its pre-order phase - so not too much in the way of demos, but there are a few - as below.

The Gravity Well can be preordered from the Cosmodio Instruments Webstore where it goes for $279. One for sonic adventurers for sure! Those pre-orders are due to ship on November 19th.

I’m still determined to get in the prior Pet Yeti release, my friend Phil at Pedal Experiments covered it pretty well not too long ago - as always, it’s a matter of juggling myriad priorities for me - but hopefully I can get some hands-on time with these Cosmodio Pedals before long!