Alright, I’m not even going to try to explain what the WOOSHING MACHINE does, or ask an AI with some lousy prompt to do it for me. Instead, let me simply tell you that this is one of the most PHASER-y phasers you’ll ever come across. A phaser, yes… but that’s only the beginning, because this beast has a lot more under the hood and ventures into entirely different modulation territories.

A traditional phaser works by creating phase shifts that generate a moving filter (typically a notch filter), which is then swept by an LFO. I could stop there, but that would ruin the pleasure of telling you that, when designing the WOOSHING MACHINE, Simon—the mastermind behind Sic Boxes—decided to take a completely different approach.

Instead of creating phase shifts to obtain a filter, he designed a fully variable filter directly, making phase shift more of a consequence than the starting point. The advantage of this philosophy is much finer control over the filter’s characteristics, its type, intensity, Q factor, and more, resulting in subtler, richer, and far more diverse sounds.

The LFO’s job is to create movement by sweeping the WOOSHING MACHINE’s filter across a defined frequency range (approximately 100 Hz to 2000 Hz on the standard guitar version).

The controls are plentiful:

• SHAPE Adjusts the symmetry of the LFO waveform by shortening either its rising portion (counter-clockwise) or its falling portion (clockwise), creating wonderfully asymmetrical modulation patterns. (External or internal control depending on the version.)
• SPEED Sets the LFO rate.
• TREM Adds a tremolo modulation to the main LFO. (External or internal control depending on the version.) An additional internal trimmer allows the tremolo speed to be adjusted.
• TYPE Determines both the type and intensity of the filter applied to the signal. At the center position, the filter is essentially flat. Turning the control counter-clockwise gradually introduces an increasingly pronounced notch filter, delivering the classic phaser character. Turning it clockwise progressively creates a band-pass filter, producing tones much closer to a wah effect.
• Q Controls the filter’s quality factor, determining the width of the affected frequency band. (External or internal control depending on the version.)

The pedal also features two internal adjustments:

• TremSpeed: an internal trimmer for setting the tremolo speed.
• FeedBack: determines how much of the output signal is fed back into the filter. The more feedback, the more pronounced and dramatic the effect becomes.

By combining a highly configurable filter with an LFO whose parameters, shape, speed, tremolo, and more, can all be adjusted, the WOOSHING MACHINE delivers an exceptionally expressive and versatile modulation effect.

Finally, an LED visualizes the LFO in real time, making the pedal more intuitive to use while giving the WOOSHING MACHINE a look that sits right on the glorious edge of good taste.