Although the current renaissance of stompbox effects is seemingly led by boutique manufacturers, Electro-Harmonix remains one of the most important innovators in the field. Going beyond the Me-Too world of fuzz-pedal clones, Mike Matthews and crew consistently pioneer new types of effects combinations, as well as improve on their earlier designs.

The company’s latest release is the Freeze ($118.50 street). Subtitled the Sound Retainer, it allows you to sustain a chord or note so you can play over it by grabbing a few milliseconds of audio input when you hit the footswitch. Although it may sound as if the Freeze is a one-trick pony, the results are inspiring. Almost immediately after I plugged in my guitar, I found myself developing new riffs and compositional ideas. And that was before I added other pedals in the signal chain.

Nano-Tech
Housed in the miniature, Nano-series metal case that is only slightly bigger than the included 9V wall-wart power supply, the Freeze has only three controls—a knob for effect level, a footswitch, and a 3-position toggle switch offering Latch, Fast, and Slow modes. The status light illuminates when you’ve captured a sound.

The level control, which is big enough to adjust with your foot, determines the amount of the sampled sound you hear. It’s not a wet/dry control, because the dry signal is always at full volume. Use this knob to set how loud the sustained sound will be against your melody or solo.

The toggle switch determines the playback behavior of the pedal. In Latch mode, the Freeze holds a chord each time you stomp the footswitch. To capture a new sound (and flush the old one), play a chord and stomp again. (The pedal doesn’t allow you to do sound-on-sound recording.) Hit the footswitch twice to turn off the effect.

The other two modes—Fast and Slow—require you to hold down the footswitch to keep your sound frozen. In Fast mode, your chord is instantly captured and held until you take your foot off the switch, at which point the sustained sound cuts off immediately.

In Slow mode, the sampled sound fades in after you stomp the switch, holds for the length of time your foot stays on the switch, then fades out when you release it. There are three different sets of fade lengths in Slow mode, which are set by a power-up sequence. The fade-in length can be either 200 or 800 ms, while the fade-out length can be 400 ms, 1 second, or 3.2 seconds. In its slowest settings, you get organ-like swells of your frozen chords.

It would be nice to be able to set the slowest fade-in time to something longer than 800 ms, which feels pretty quick when compared to a 3-second fade-out. In addition, I wish I could change the fade times without unplugging the unit: It would be great to have a switch that allowed me to reset the fades on the fly.

Of course, the Freeze has unbalanced 1/4-inch input and output jacks that are impedance matched for passive guitars and basses, but without true bypass. Nonetheless, I used the Freeze with circuit bent instruments, which had line-level output, and the pedal sounded great.

Granular Guitar
Although I couldn’t get Electro-Harmonix to tell me exactly how much audio is sampled by the Freeze, it sounds as if it’s much less than 100 ms. With such a short amount time that can be captured, you’re limited to a certain sonic quality in the sustained chord or note. The sound is looped smoothly—no clicks or pops, ever—but in some cases you can hear different parts of the frequency spectrum subtly modulating, as if there is a different loop point for the high, medium, and low frequency bands. It’s not unpleasant, but it often ends up giving you a tone that is synth- or accordion-like if you feed the pedal an unprocessed sound.

The real trick with the Freeze is learning to hit the footswitch at just the right time to capture the tone you want. If you strum the strings from low to high and hit the switch too late, you’ll capture only the higher strings. With a few minutes of practice, you’ll get a feel for the right moment to stomp the switch.

The E-H website includes a series of tips [http://www.ehx.com/blog/electro-harmonix-effectology-special-edition-freeze-tricks] for using the Freeze, including capturing noisy, glitchy sounds by playing string glissandi and freezing the results. My favorite trick is that, by combining the Freeze with a delay pedal, you can capture repeated tones to create a somewhat ethereal soundscape. (In fact, if you haven’t checked out the company’s excellent series of Effectology videos, you should. Although the effects processing is based around Electro-Harmonix pedals exclusively, many of the effects combinations will work with pedals from other manufacturers. It’s like a series of master classes for creative guitarists.)

I added a distortion pedal in front of the Freeze—in this case, the new Germanium 4 Big Muff Pi—to capture nasty, industrial sounding textures, but then lowering the volume so I could play over them with a clean tone. Working the opposite way—freezing a clean sound and playing over it with heavy fuzz—ended up sounding like a Robert Fripp project. Nice!

Enter Frozone
It would be easy for serious loop-music aficionados to dismiss the Freeze because it doesn’t offer the extensive features of the typical looping device. But that’s not what this pedal is about.

The Freeze is designed to capture and hold just enough of a tone or chord for you to solo over. And that’s exactly what it does. The Freeze is a unique pedal that is fun to use, and I highly recommend it.

Pros: Fun and easy to use.
Cons: Cannot be powered by batteries. Power-up sequence required to change speeds in Slow mode.

Gino Robair is Editorial Director for Gearwire.com.