The 5 best and the 4 worst Walrus Audio pedals.

Analog, bucket brigade, and two controls that matter more than the rest: Lag, which sets how far the warble sits from your dry signal, and a blend that sweeps from dry through chorus into full vibrato. Lag at ten o'clock is a polite CE-2. Lag at two o'clock is seasick in the My Bloody Valentine sense. Mine has been on every board I have built since 2017, and at $199 street it is the fairest transaction in modern pedals. The Julianna adds stereo and tap tempo if you have the real estate.

Four programs: digital, analog voiced, lo-fi, slap. Run the digital program with the dampen knob rolled back and you get the sound people chase across a Carbon Copy and a DD-8 without finding it. Tap tempo with subdivisions, $199 street. It held the last slot on my board for three years, and the only thing that ever displaced it was a Volante I did not need. Buy it once and stop thinking about delay.

Hall, Plate, Lo-fi, Sonar. The Hall is a working hall and the Plate prints: an engineer at a session in Queens ran my Fathom plate straight to the record without asking what it was, which is the whole review. The sleeper is the Lo-fi program, a filtered, crumbling wash that sits behind a drummer instead of on top of one. Same $199 as the Slo. More of it usable on a Tuesday night.

The RAT family tree, minus the part where the RAT vanishes from a band mix. The clipping switch runs from compressed and tight to open and mean, and the low end stays planted at volume, which is the entire reason to own this instead of the original. This magazine already said it in the JHS piece: twice the pedal at not-twice the price. About $199 street, and it once finished a set that another Walrus on this list could not. Keep reading.

Harmonic tremolo splits the signal into high and low bands and rocks them against each other, which is why it reads as an old brownface amp instead of an effect. At a soul gig in March the front-of-house engineer asked which vintage Fender I was hiding backstage. It was a Monument in harmonic mode into a silverface Deluxe. Tap tempo, small footprint, $199 street. The standard mode is fine. The harmonic mode is the purchase.

Here is the take that gets me yelled at. Dark, Rise, and Dream are three doors into the same grey wash, the latching sustain is a demo trick you perform twice, and in a band mix the Fathom does everything useful the Slo does while keeping a plate you will reach for weekly. I owned one for a year; by month four it was a stand for my setlist. Lo (lo.flannery) gigs a Slo beautifully, and she plays ambient sets where the wash is the song. If that is your gig, buy it today. If you play songs with drummers, it is $199 of mood lighting.

Five clipping states and not one of them survives a loud room. The Eras applies the Ages formula to high gain, and it exposes the difference between the two jobs: overdrive rewards options, distortion rewards conviction. The Ages earns its five positions because breakup is a spectrum. At rehearsal volume the Eras is credible. At the gig, the low end folded on the first chorus and the Iron Horse on the same board finished the night. About $199 street for a question nobody asked Walrus to answer.

Chorus, phaser, tremolo, vibrato, rotary, filter, with the deep parameters hidden under shift functions. On paper it replaces five pedals. At soundcheck I spent four minutes trying to remember which press-and-turn combination edited the rotary speed while the drummer watched me. The D1 and R1 justify the Mako tax because delay and reverb are preset instruments. Modulation is a knob instrument, and Walrus already builds the proof for $100 less. It is called the Julia. About $299 street.

The circuits are fine, the price is right at about $99 street, and none of it survives the sliders. Sliders with no detents cannot be read across a dark stage, cannot be recalled after the case knocks them flat, and cannot be trusted after one load-in. A drive setting is a contract between your foot and a sound; the Fundamental line renegotiates that contract every gig. Buy a used ARP-87 for $130 instead. The extra thirty dollars buys you knobs.

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