Today I’d like to make a reintroduction. This is Mirror House V2: our collaboration with Pile, now officially part of our full pedal lineup.
Mirror House is a digital pitch modulator. Its two voices veer off in equal and opposite directions to create weird detuning, microtonal cluster chords, parallel harmonies, and other means of melodic disorientation both subtle and provocative.
You can read about it here, but this effect is certainly better heard than described. Be sure to check out the demo videos today, including our technical demo featuring Rick from Pile. For more backstory, read on.
The Story
Pile is a band that is (more or less) from Boston. We’ve been good friends with them for some time now: our repair tech Miranda is their longtime sound engineer, and I played violin on a couple of their records, including the upcoming LP Sunshine and Balance Beams coming out in August (be sure to check out the single if you haven’t yet.)
Mirror House was originally developed and released in 2023. (Side note: we originally made a video with our friend Ryan Dight, which is a great entry point into the sounds and story of the pedal.) The launch coincided with the release of Pile’s LP All Fiction, an intricately layered record that was equal parts tense and dreamy: a particularly claustrophobic and synthesizer-tinged reflection of the band’s distinct songwriting.
Taking inspiration from Rick’s approach to layering detuned synthesizer voices, we delved into the warbly, eerie timbre of primitive digital pitch shifting algorithms. We settled on a core concept of a dual-voice pitch shifter where the two voices always move symmetrically. The idea was for the detune effect to range from gradual widening to an atonal cluster chord of half steps. To expand beyond our original inspiration, we added an envelope detector so that the amount of detuning could be dynamically controlled. Playing harder could force the voices apart, producing dissonance on command. By isolating individual voices, dynamic vibrato and divebomb effects became possible. And a surprisingly good faux chorus emerged too.
Later in the development process, Rick asked if I could widen the boundaries of the pitch bending up to an octave in either generation, to produce harmonic intervals from a single note. The result was Shift mode. The mirrored structure of the pitch engine naturally lends itself to stacked parallel intervals, bending traditional rules of harmony in surprising ways.
Truly, the whole thing was an exercise in emergent phenomena! Perhaps that is a natural consequence of exploring the intersection of harmony, dynamics, and dissonance. We hope you find it surprising too.
Closing Thoughts
This pedal was previously available only through the band, and it was produced in fairly small quantities. We all agreed that it deserved a wider release. For Version 2, we made a few minor improvements (lower noise, soft switching, improved envelope tracking) and we added a third mode called “Flutter”, which trades the envelope functionality for a random LFO to provide a semblance of normality within the pedal and tie the whole thing together.
Mirror House is available now through participating dealers worldwide and through our web store, where you can also find direct exclusive acid-etched units. We made a bunch of them and if we sell out, there will be more.
Thanks to everyone, especially to Pile, for joining us on this project. We’re excited to hear the sounds you make with this thing.