Mothership 2

- Trevor Curwen

We all know about guitar synths by now: a hexaphonic pickup fixed to your guitar connecting to an external unit with MIDI will give you access to any sound you like. But there is also the other genre of guitar synths: those that come in a stompbox and allow you to just plug any guitar directly in and get a more focused, but limited, range of synth sounds from the output.

The original Pigtronix Mothership, first seen about nine years ago, was one of the latter. But now the US company has introduced its successor, the Mothership 2, which moves the show onwards thanks to advances in technology, and allows them to make the claim that it has the world’s fastest pitch-tracking circuit. It is much more compact and pedalboard-friendly than the original too, partly because it utilises dual concentric knobs to adjust 10 parameters.