Downgrade is a modulated delay.
Drift off to sleep and be greeted by dreams of floating or nightmares of a past come back to haunt you. Downgrade is a modulated delay that does some things wrong but it feels so right. The heart is your standard PT2399 echo but tweaked to give you a super wide range of delay times - the longer they get, the more messed up they sound - and that's before we get to the modulation. Two types of modulation will give you all the woozy and weird sounds you could want. The first modulates the delay time - by a little or a lot (I'm talking crazy rumbles and pings) - to give you a wonderful, seasick pitch modulation in the repeats. The waveform is dependent on the control positions and gets more abrupt and stranger the further the controls are pushed. The second modulates the sample rate of the repeats - gently downgrading the fidelity and clarity with each passing repeat until it's all a noisy wash.

Controls:
Delay: How long before the note repeats, from about 32ms (crystal clear) to a little over a second (garbled and noisy)
Echo: How many times the note repeats, above 2o'clock you get into various levels of self-oscillation
Mix: How loud the repeats are, above around 2o'clock the repeated note is louder than the initial note
Speed: How fast the time/pitch modulation oscillates, from about 0.2Hz to 5Hz
Depth: How much the repeats change in time, from no effect at all to complete noise chaos
Freak: Frequency of the sample rate modulator
Loss: How much information is lost each echo

Powered by standard - BOSS style - 9VDC center negative supply.

Background:
Downgrade is the second pedal idea I had when I initially came up with the idea of Hamburger City. Then I kind of went down the wormhole of fuzz and drive and weird synthy stuff. I recently found out that I was going to be losing my day job and to avoid being too mad about it, I started designing this from scratch. I knew I was doing some things "wrong" but somehow, they ended up sounding really great. I love this pedal. It's so weird. It's versatile. It will melt you.