WALRUS AUDIO MELEE

£299 | A joystick-controlled reverb: slam-dunk or gimmick? You decide…

- Alex Lynham

Maybe ‘fad’ is a bit harsh, but several years ago there was a brief demand for pedals with joysticks, presumably driven by their popularity in modular synth setups. The most famous of these was the Walrus Janus, a tremolo-fuzz that looked more like a games console controller than a pedal. Unfortunately, the Janus felt like a bit of a missed opportunity. The joystick for the fuzz side didn’t control parameters that were more inspiring as a joystick than as normal potentiometers. Now, Walrus have returned with the Melee, a joystick-controlled reverb/delay. Does it avoid the same pitfalls?

The answer is no, not really. The two parameters governed by the joystick are distortion level and reverb mix. Why the decision was made to control distortion rather than reverb decay is baffling. The more logical choice would surely have been reverb decay, and reverb mix, or even reverb decay and distortion.