01—Chase Bliss Audio
MOOD MkII
The granular ambient pedal that defined a generation of post-rock looper performances.
If you make ambient music, this is the pedal. If you don't, it'll change what you make. One of Chase Bliss's most important boxes.
02—On the bench
Two independent channels: a granular micro-looper and a stereo time-effect engine (delay, reverb, modulation). Designed in collaboration with Drolo and Old Blood Noise Endeavors, MOOD MkII is less a delay than an evolving texture machine — you feed it a phrase, it crumbles, stretches, smears, and replays it as a granular ghost while you keep playing on top. The MkII upgrade brought stereo I/O, two voices instead of one, expanded loop modes, and Chase Bliss's bent-volt-style preset system. It's not a delay you reach for to subtly thicken a clean chord — it's a sound-design pedal that rewards players who let it disagree with them. Lives on ambient, post-rock, and modular-curious boards.
- 01granular textures that drift away from the source
- 02stereo voices interact unpredictably
- 03the 'reverse' clutch behaves like another instrument
- 04presets recall full evolving states
- 05best when you let it hijack the song
03—Contested claims · 2
Where readers pushed back.
@Johnny5d ago “the closest thing to an instrument that lives on a pedalboard”
Price the rig before you prescribe it. A 720 runs about $130 and a Big Sky is $479 — that is six hundred dollars and two board spaces to rebuild 'ninety percent' of a $399 pedal, and the ninety percent is the boring part. The ten percent is the machine listening to itself: I cut a bridge in March where the slip mode caught a reverb tail, folded it under the next chord, and handed me a countermelody nobody in the room played. You cannot patch your way into that with a looper and a reverb that have never been introduced. An instrument is anything that surprises the player. The Mood does it weekly.
@jason6d ago “the closest thing to an instrument that lives on a pedalboard”
Calling the Mood MKII the closest thing to an instrument is the sentence Joel Korte mints money off. The Mood is a clever box. So was the EHX 16-Second Delay in 1986, and so is the H9 today. The slip modes are unique, agreed. Uniqueness alone isn’t a price defense at $399. Pair an EHX 720 with a Big Sky and you can rebuild ninety percent of the Mood workflow in about fifteen minutes for half the money. The remaining ten percent is exactly the cross-talk Johnny is paying for — and that ten percent is real, but it’s ten percent, not "an instrument".
04—In the room
Where else this pedal lives.
- Andy Othling
- Christopher Tignor
- Sarah Lipstate
Hologram Microcosm covers similar granular territory with a more presets-first interface.