Signal Chain: Weekly Noise Report (Mar 16 – Mar 22)

EQD drops a reverb pedal their founder's been sitting on for years. The Neural DSP Quad Cortex Mini shrinks the flagship by half and doesn't give up a thing. Gaerea went full Century Media and the black metal internet is still processing it. Meanwhile the Wonder Years played Brooklyn Paramount and told everyone it might be the last time. Lot happening this week. All of it worth paying attention to.

THE GEAR RACK: FRESH DROPS & HOT TRASH

EarthQuaker Devices Towers Stereo Reverberant Filter

Jamie Stillman has been building pedals in Akron for over fifteen years and he says the Towers is one of his favorites he's ever made — which carries weight when you've built half the ambient pedalboards on the internet. The $299 Towers is not a reverb pedal in the usual sense: it runs your signal into resonant filtered feedback networks that spit out a full stereo expanse with three distinct modes. Manual locks you in the driver's seat on the filter frequencies and stereo movement. Envelope Mode lets your playing dynamics morph the filters live. LFO Mode hands over control to a slow-moving oscillator and asks you to trust it. There's also a Stretch footswitch that doubles the reverb length and pitch-bends the whole thing. MusicRadar called it a reverb pedal like no other. That's not hype — it's just a different animal.

Suhr Thornicus Fuzz

Suhr announcing a dual-channel fuzz is already surprising. Suhr announcing a dual-channel fuzz with an octave-up mode, MIDI compatibility, and an Ian Thornley signature is the kind of thing that makes you stop scrolling. The Thornicus shipped March 20th, which means the reviews are just starting to filter in. The Fuzz side goes thick and saturated with warm velvety breakup. The octave fuzz side captures that raw blooming tone Thornley's known for — Sustain, Level, Tone, Mids on both sides, simple controls for something that does a lot. MIDI recall on a fuzz pedal is a choice that'll either make perfect sense on your rig or feel completely unnecessary, but Suhr knows their customer. Guitar Pedal X covered the announcement in full.

JHS Double Dragon

JHS went somewhere they haven't been before: forty-to-fifty-year-old analog octave divider territory. The Double Dragon is their first-ever octaver and it's built on the same circuit DNA as the MXR Blue Box, Boss OC-2, Ibanez OT10, and EHX Micro-Synth. Both voices are completely analog — OCT− gives you thick vintage sub tones with that classic tracking-as-a-feature lo-fi wobble, OCT+ is a gritty, mid-forward octave-up distortion that hits differently depending on where you pick. This isn't a precision tool. It's for the people who already have a clean octave and want to know what chaos sounds like. The guitar pedal universe has been waiting for Josh Scott to go weird like this.

Neural DSP Quad Cortex Mini

This is the one that actually matters at €1,299. Same internals as the full Quad Cortex — same processing architecture, same audio quality, same Neural Capture technology — shrunk by more than 50% and shipping now. Sound On Sound covered the NAMM announcement in January, and Guitar World's review called it a gold-standard modeler that ships with 90+ amps, 100+ effects, 1,000 IRs, and 2,000+ captures. The form factor — 22.8 x 11.8 cm, 1.5 kg — makes it viable on a pedalboard in a way the original wasn't. Seven-inch touchscreen, four stainless steel footswitch encoders. If you've been waiting for the Quad Cortex to fit in a reasonable space, the wait is done.

THE SOCIAL DISCOURSION

Gaerea — Loss (March 20, Century Media)

Gaerea's fifth album landed this week and the conversation split immediately. The Portuguese black metal collective signed to Century Media and went melodic — singing, catchy choruses, dynamic songwriting that pushes hard against the post-black metal box they built. Chaoszine called it their most defiantly unclassifiable record yet. The skeptics say it's a reach for a bigger audience at the cost of longtime fans. The defenders say the intensity and emotion are still intact. Both sides have a point. What's clear is that Century Media doesn't sign you to stay underground, and Gaerea knows exactly what they're doing.

Interpol — "See Out Loud" Live Debut, São Paulo

First new Interpol material since The Other Side of Make-Believe in 2022, and it showed up the way it should — not as a streaming drop but as a live debut at a club in São Paulo on March 19, then again the next night at Lollapalooza Brasil. NME called it "propulsive" and that's the right word: it's got the pulsing rhythmic drive of Antics and El Pintor, Banks leading the verses while Kessler takes a rare vocal over a synthy interlude before it opens into a rock crescendo. New album incoming — Fogarino co-wrote but isn't touring (spinal surgery in 2023), so they've got The Armed's Chris Broome on drums for the run. Stereogum has the clip. A new Interpol record is not a small thing.

The Wonder Years — Brooklyn Paramount, March 4 (and "maybe the last time")

The Wonder Years opened their No Closer to Heaven 10th anniversary tour at Brooklyn Paramount on March 4 — their biggest indoor headline show ever, two sets, the album in full plus six other records' worth of material. And then they told everyone these might be their last shows for "an undetermined amount of time." The post-hardcore internet went appropriately quiet for about twelve hours. If you're on the fence about catching a date before April 12 in Philadelphia, stop being on the fence.

The Boutique Pedal Market Discourse — Still Going

 Ultimate Guitar's piece on pedals trending down in popularity is still circling the forums and this week made an especially bad argument for itself. EQD dropped a reverb they've been sitting on for years. JHS built their first-ever octaver and went all the way lo-fi with it. Suhr shipped a MIDI fuzz. Neural DSP cut their flagship in half. That's four significant drops in seven days from builders who know exactly who they're building for. The market isn't saturated — it's sorting itself into people who buy gear and people who obsess about it. Those groups are not the same size and never were.

THE NOISE FLOOR: MUST-WATCH VIDEOS

Guitar World / MusicRadar — Mesa Boogie '90s Triple Rectifier Stealth Demo

Every gear site covered this one and the demos have been circulating all week. If you want to hear what 150 watts of vintage-circuit Recto sounds like through that blacked-out grille, the video documentation is everywhere. Premier Guitar, Guitar World, and GearNews all have walk-throughs. Worth watching to hear whether the reissue sounds like the original or like a reissue. Watch Here →

Knobs — NAM and the Blackstar Beam Mini Context

If Knobs drops a Beam Mini demo, it'll be the most visually interesting take on a $229 amp you'll ever see. The channel's entire lens — context over specs, feel over features — is exactly how a NAM-integrated desktop amp needs to be discussed. Check the KNOBs Creative channel for their current demo queue. If they haven't hit it yet, they will. Watch Here →

JHS Pedals — Double Dragon Demo

Josh Scott dropped the Double Dragon coverage on his channel and this one rewards repeat watching — not just because the octave fuzz territory is fun but because the history-of-the-circuit framing that JHS does well makes the lo-fi angle land harder. If you want context on why a new octaver built on '70s circuit DNA is more interesting than another overdrive clone, this is the walkthrough. Watch Here →

GEAREL SIGNAL BOOST

Keep Music Real Tee

The conversation this week kept circling back to the same question: what's real and what's a reach? Gaerea catching heat for going melodic. Boutique builders still dropping pedals no algorithm recommended. The Wonder Years playing the biggest indoor show of their career and calling it maybe the last one. Some of the most interesting gear of the year hitting in a week when someone's always ready to say it's all oversaturated.

GEAREL doesn't make apparel for the people arguing about that online. It's for the ones in the room — the ones who built their signal chain piece by piece.

Keep Music Real Tee →

Signal Chain is GEAREL's weekly dispatch on gear culture, scene noise, and the stuff that actually matters to musicians.