Walrus Luminary

Following in the Walrus tradition, this pedal is anything but traditional. Not only can you get wonderful sounding and performing octave effects, but you have many other controls and the easiest to use filter we have seen. Sonically, this pedal is truly unique and can produce a surprisingly useful and unquestionably high quality range of sounds. If you already have an octave pedal, this will make you question your choice of pedal. If you do not have an octave pedal, you will want this one.

External Control: EXP
Cost: $$$

HornFX Review

Interface:  4/5
This pedal is incredibly easy to use. All of the knobs work well and intuitively.The most gratifying and surprising one is the filter knob. Very rarely do we see a single knob for an envelope filter that functions nicely and sounds good. This one is wonderful.

Versatility: 4/5
A surprising amount of sounds can come out of this. The four different octaves all sound good, the flutter knob allows for some great leslie type sounds, the attack knob lets you dial in a nice swell, and the filter knob does a beautiful job. Our only complaint is that the filter does not work on the dry signal.

Tonal reproduction: 4/5
The individual tones of each octave are not perfect. As with most pedals of this type, the farther you get from the source note, the less tonal integrity you have. That being said, this is among the best sounding octave pedals out there. Definitely a great machine for making a unison horn section.

Tracking speed: 4/5
The tracking speed is excellent and interacts well with the filter.

Live application: 4/5
With its three presets, and huge range of high quality, usable sounds, this pedal would be a great addition to any live setup. For sax players, the mimicking of a baritone or a soprano when you are playing tenor is not perfect, but is more convincing than most other octave pedals.

Product Information

Tastefully updated in all the right places, the Luminary V2 expands its watchful eye for versatility in many genres and musical tastes.

• Refined octave volume knobs

• Lengthened attack time

• Revised envelope low-pass filter

• Tremolo effect on flutter knob

• Added Smart Momentary Bypassing

The Luminary is a powerful polyphonic quad octave generator with features for creating inspiring symphonic gusts of sound. Operating on the Analog Devices Sharc platform, the Luminary gives you the ability to dial in any combination of four separate octaves including -2, -1, +1, and +2, the user can craft many different complex sounds and textures with crystal clear and immediate octave tracking. The Luminary has three onboard presets available for saving your go-to sounds, as a well as live mode. This means the user can have up to four custom sounds available at any moment. Get epic steel sounds with the modulation control unengaged. You’ll find more experimental options with the filter control or a tremolo effect with the flutter control. Couple the Luminary with an expression pedal to expand its creativity even more.

Extended Info

Four octave options available -2, -1, +1, +2 – The four knobs across the top of the pedal control the level of each octave. With the Dry/Wet control, the user can explore the ground between minimum and 12 o’clock to keep the octave signal lower than your dry signal for subtleness. The territory between 12 o’clock and maximum keeps the user’s dry signal lower than unity for a boastful octave sound.

The Attack control dictates how fast the octaves bloom after the initial attack. Allow the octaves to swell in gradually at a higher attack setting. Hear immediate octave response with the attack control low or off. The Filter knob controls the cutoff of a low-pass filter on the octave signals and also increases an envelope type effect at higher settings. The Flutter knob enables a tremolo effect that can be applied to the octaves. At zero, the tremolo effect is off. Increasing this knob engages the tremolo modulation and controls the rate of the effect.

The expression control allows the manipulation of any combination of these options to allow the user to customize the effectiveness of the Luminary: -1 and +1 octave volume, +1 octave volume, Attack, Flutter, and Dry/Wet

Specification

The Luminary comes in a sand pebble texture colored enclosure with black and red ink, featuring original artwork of a dystopian dictator’s watchful eye. Exact size of the diecast enclosure is 4.67” x 3.68” x 1.547”. Power requirements are 9VDC (300mA minimum). Power supply not included.

*Note: Strymon power supplies will not work with the Luminary.* 

The Luminary comes in a sand pebble texture colored enclosure with black and red ink, featuring original artwork of a dystopian dictator’s watchful eye. Exact size of the diecast enclosure is 4.67” x 3.68” x 1.547”. Power requirements are 9VDC (250mA minimum)

Product info taken from the Walrus website.