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Screen Violence - Old Blood Noise Endeavors

Oct 5, 2022

The Screen Violence is designed and built by Old Blood Noise Endeavors in collaboration with the synth-pop band CHVRCHES. The Screen Violence takes inspiration from their album of the same name.

It is a genius device capable of modulation, slap-back delay, reverb, fuzzy drive and countless ways to combine all of that to create interesting textures for washy dream-pop or gritty shoegaze soundscapes.

The above paragraph looks like I’m just flexing my ad copywriter muscles. But I’m just trying to squeeze in as many fitting adjectives as OBNE crams sounds into one box.

I’m digging this pedal so much. I’ll admit I haven’t really dug into CHVRCHES yet, but if they need a guitarist, I’m in!

The Screen Violence has some very clever design choices from an interface design perspective. Firstly, it’s just a very impressive, big box with big hunkin’ knobs and toggles. Secondly, at a closer look there aren’t too many controls on it given the vast amount of sounds this is capable of.

The Violence side features a few simple controls typical for overdrive: Violence (gain), voice (tone), and a toggle switch to choose between more gain/tighter compression and less gain/more open overdrive. What’s clever here is that the voice knob seems to be a cut/boost for higher frequencies that sits before the gain section. So boosting highs just adds more saturation for higher frequencies, while cutting highs tames the Violence while retaining the fuzzy textures.

The Screen side only has mix, mode and Screen controls. The two modes both have unique characters useful for different scenarios. The clever twist is that the Screen knob cycles through different modulation/reverb types. We go from chorus/vibrato to modulated delay reverb in a seemingly fluid fashion.

This is great for when you just want some magic modulation and/or ambience, but you don’t really care about the details as long as it sounds cool.

And to top it all of, there is a giant toggle in the middle letting you choose the order of the Screen and Violence sides. So you can go for classic, slightly crunchy and ambient post-rock tones or noisy shoegaze textures.

And all this is in stereo. I was never hugely into stereo. But the Screen Violence makes it super convenient to add width and depth to any track without having to double track guitar parts.

As a bonus option, the Violence side can be transformed to an even gnarlier version. In mono mode (meaning nothing is plugged into the second in- and outputs), you can press both footswitches simultaneously for about 5 seconds. When the right LED turns red, Stacked Violence is engaged, giving you a more distorted, fuzzy drive.

The Screen Violence has been an amazing tool so far for me for producing tracks. I reserved a permanent space for it on recording pedalboard.

Recording Notes

Guitar

  • Fidelity Guitars Stellarosa Lite II with Lollar Firebird pickups (both pickups in series mode)
  • Screen Violence
  • Strymon Iridium (chime)

Overdubs

All overdubs were done with different pickup configurations from the Fidelity Stellarosa and the Screen Violence with different settings. This is such a great, versatile sound device that I could record an entire album just with this.

Bass

Drums

Drums were recorded and mixed by Greg @gearadd1ct. Go give him a follow and say hi from me. He likes to nerd out on drums, pedals and recording.

The whole mix was “mastered” with exciter, limiter and mild compression in the DAW.

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