Hi @bobcooper good question! We were actually thinking it would be a late summer sale / drop instead of a pre-order. But time is flying by and we are reevaluating some things. With all the analog circuitry in Sparks it requires pretty intense oversight / involvement from Jaak and we don’t have bandwidth to make more quite yet. We are focusing on the current Ribbons pre-order and delivering a 2.0 firmware update for that. Once we have news about more Sparks we’ll post on the forum and you should get an email.
If you’re itching for a Sparks asap there are a couple on Reverb for very close to retail price. Possibly a good move!
Really interested in this pedal!
Regarding stereo possibilities: is it possible to run different drives on the L and R channels and control them via MIDI?
Yes. You can assign the LFO to multiple parameters at once. But you’d only need to map it to volume and then select how far away from noon on the volume you want it (this is your depth). The rate of the trem would be the rate knob above map.
You can take it further and map pretty much every other parameter at the same time to a different depth, though they all share the same rate. You can even map an envelope to the rate or depth so you can control the rate of the lfo or depth (or both) by your playing dynamics. Truly a deep pedal.
As someone who possesses the mental illness of maintaining a full WDW guitar rig - bursting at the seams to replace my current wet section with the incoming Ribbons+Sparks+2xGhosts!!! - yet extremely limited experience with synths, might I ask if one is able to utilize its various sections {maybe ENV/LFO/Filter?} to get polyphonic synth type sounds from the Sparks?
To a degree… There is a synth inside the pedal you can use with a midi controller/device, but if you’re strictly using a guitar, you can coax some synth-inspired sounds from it. The wavefolding can take a guitar signal and make it sort of like a synth–although it doesn’t work very well with dense or complex chords (best with single notes or octaves).
You can throw in the LFOs and envelope to mimic some synth behavior, like swells or filter sweeps, but if you’re looking to get BOSS SY-1 sort of sounds out of it, it can’t really do that without using the internal synth. But synth-adjacent sounds, sure.
“Synth-adjacent” is actually preferred, in my case. In sticking with your lexicon, I’m just looking for the “behavior” typically exhibited by polyphonic chord swells achieved through envelope sensitivity, etc.
