Bare Necessities

Walrus Audio presents an accessible set of pedals that is designed to last the journey all the way from beginner to pro

- Trevor Curwen

WALRUS AUDIO
FUNDAMENTAL SERIES PEDALS
£95 TO £125

CONTACT FACE bvba PHONE [phone] WEB www.walrusaudio.com

Up until now Walrus Audio seems to have specialised in the more complex side of effects pedals, many with fancy graphics. The company’s new Fundamental Series, however, couldn’t be further from that with a minimalist yet stylish black finish. There are no fancy names here, either; these get straight to the point. If you want a distortion pedal, it’s simply called Distortion and so on for another seven of the most popular effects pedal genres – Drive, Fuzz, Tremolo, Chorus, Phaser, Delay and Reverb.

The new series has been designed as a back-to-basics collection with simple controls, a small footprint and a lower price but without any skimping on sound quality. There’s plenty of versatility to be found here, too: each has a three-way switch to call up different modes – the Reverb pedal, for example, offers Hall, Spring and Plate reverbs. The rest of the control surface consists of sliders, rather than knobs, to adjust parameters. These feel nice and solid, and each has a centre detent position as a starting point for your tweaking.

While each pedal follows exactly the same format and is nicely sized to make good use of pedalboard space, the power socket is unfortunately sited on the side. This was probably necessary because of space restrictions and circuitry, but we would have liked to have seen it between the I/O connections at the top end, so you could put together a neat row of pedals side by side with no gaps.