Demo: HEXE reVolver II

Get ready for futuristic sounds and computer chaos with the Pedals And Effects review of the reVOLVER II by HEXE Guitar Electronics, from Hamburg Germany! My friends in the band, Dot Hacker brought this pedal to my attention. Everyone in that band has this pedal in their arsenal and I may or may not have gone into my savings to grab one too.

The reVOLVER II is a Micro Looper/Glitch/Stutter pedal that really chops your signal up in the most sci-fi sounding way. Imagine you’re having a bad dream where computers, and laptops are chasing after you, and the sound these villains are making would sound like any instrument going through the reVOLVER!

HEXE has designed a pedal that can “record up to 1 second of audio material, keep it in an infinite loop (basic stutter effect), change the play speed (like in tape reel machines), reverse the play direction.”  There is also a set of randomized modes that use an internal random value generator to change the parameters each time you capture a new sample. Also, there is an auto self re-triggering mode where the pedal captures the samples automatically.

We found that the reVOLVER’s sample TIME control, that sets the maximum sample buffer length only, is the funnest part of the pedal. The actual sample length is controlled by the amount of time the CAPTURE footswitch is held down. Essentially, when the TIME setting is set to max (1 second) you can still record shorter samples just by releasing the CAPTURE footswitch before the maximum available buffer time is up. That is where you can get incredibly glitchy sounds!

So here is Nick Reinhart and I, trying to wrangle this pedal in but it has so much functionality that we barely scrape the surface of HEXE’s reVOLVER II. Check the next Dot Hacker record for a more musical use of this pedal! Keep in mind the reVOLVER II has since been discontinued and updated with the HEXE reVOLVER DX! 

-Juan