Anyhoo, the dock got here last night, and after some initial issues getting everything working right (if you've never used one of these before, know ahead of time that you have to press REALLY HARD to get it to switch on or off. Once it is on, the Red Panda has two switchable modes that you navigate between with a more gentle tap. Being a dope, I thought that switching between modes was supposed to turn it on and off. Not so much. Curt and Eti were very patient in getting me to understand that my dock wasn't actually broken).
SO... I've had about fifteen minutes to play with this thing properly, and I have to rave - even in that little time, I've found that this thing is a BEAST. It is not the typical fuzz, since it fully embraces it's digitalness, and distorts through sample reduction. But I'm not all fancy and smart, so I'll let Eti and Curt explain it if people want more details. If you're willing to get down with the world of ones and zeros, this will rock your socks off. At least four footswitchable modes (five if you include the tap-freq function), three waveforms, and six knobs for mix, crush, freq, envelope, lfo and speed... all that means that you have more sounds in this tiny little box than you'll know what to do with.
Frankly, there are a number of people on this board who need this little beastie ( <cough>bigchiefbc<cough>) - anyone into modulation and crazy weird synthy ramping noises: this pedal is for you. And since that covers, oh, about half of the people here, I'm hoping Red Panda should be able to sell more than a few of these units here.
I'm going to play with this more, and hopefully have more demo clips up, but couldn't wait to get something out there to show you all how nutso this thing is. In the clip attached, I'm playing with the exact same knob settings, just switching between my clean signal, envelope, hold, tracking down and tracking up modes (in that order). No other effects or eq have been added, and I've put this on the pretty crush-heavy side, so you can really hear the digital crazytude. When one riff ends, I hold a note so you can hear the lfo and crush do their things. Then when the notes die out, the next riff is in the next mode.
I see many enjoyable hours of knob tweakage ahead of me...
EDIT: just added a second file, "red panda gentle step" showing the pedal's sweeter side - this one is all in the track up mode, and shows how you can get sweet little delay-esque sounds out of the LFO when you're at lower crush settings, using the square-stepped waveform.
I've never toyed with the Bitrman, though I've seen 'em mentioned around here a couple of times.
