HI.
Has anyone here got the new “lossy” plugin pedal from Chasebliss?
As a big fan of the Phoebe Bridgers Punisher record I thought it was cool that those sounds a now in a pedal for people. I was almost FOMOd into the release day but didnt.
I am wondering has anyone played the two side by side and how complementary they are. Yes I know they are doing different things.
A friend of mine has the Lossy and I got a chance to try it last week. It’s really cool! I’m a fan. I think overall they are pretty different devices but there is definitely some textural overlap.
They both have reverb, limiters, and filters. I didn’t spend much time listening to the limiter but I think it’s pretty similar to the one on Ribbons. The Ribbons compressor is modeled after the Vinyl Sim compressor on the SP-303. Good Hertz (designer of the Lossy) has done something similar with their plugin the Vulf Compressor - maybe some of that spilled over into the Lossy limiter design. The reverb on Lossy seems more room-y and practical to me while Ribbons’ is more lush / endless sounding.
Degradation effects are def where they differ - Lossy’s spectral degradation is unique and Ribbons can’t do that. Some of the sputtery effects remind me of the tape crinkle on Ribbons but different. No pitch modulation effects on Lossy.
The freeze function on Lossy is very interesting - it can be used to grab the spectral content of your audio and then smear it over time, creating some nice ambient textures.
If I were working on music I would probably grab one or the other. Not sure I’d use the effects together. I think they could get in each other’s way. I bet using Ribbons’ 4-track or some of the Touch Modes with Lossy’s effects though could be a really cool / complimentary combination.
Hope that’s helpful. I’m curious what others think too!
hmm interesting. good to get your perspective on it.
Im debating trading one Ribbons in for a lossy but Im fairly sure the Ribbons is a bonafide (future) classic and a couple hundred made vs multiple thousands of Lossys. So maybe I should just buy a Lossy sometime as its not like they are rare.
Hey there! I’ve got both and I feel my experience was on par with Jaak’s. The filtering is very similar on both pedals, although they function differently, with Ribbons doing Low and/or Hi-Pass filtering, and Lossy doing a single-band or inverted-band filtering. But they can approximate the same sort of effect, so if you’re only looking at them as a filter pedal, they can both get close to each other. Although Lossy does have internal dip switch ramping, so you can create a sweeping filter without the need for an external control.
It’s hard to choose between the two reverbs: Ribbons is really great for ambient stuff, and I prefer to have it after the effects in it, but the Lossy reverb has a near-essential effect on the digital aliasing when used pre-effects. They both sound great on their own as stand alone reverbs, so both pedals win.
I did try and use the effects together, but it didn’t yield interesting results to be honest. To me, the appeal of Ribbons is the tape-like nature of the effects, and the appeal of Lossy is the spectral artifacts, but when you try to combine them, their overlapping filters, dropouts, and glitches feel a bit redundant. You could use Lossy first for the artifacts/underwater sound, and then use Ribbons for wow & flutter and looping or some of the touch effects, but I preferred to let each one do its own thing separately.
Ultimately, they are complimentary, but they each can be justified on a board because their core sounds (magnetic tape and digital compression/artifacting) have such specific and unique tones that there are ways to use them that are wildly different, even if they can sound the same at certain settings. Hope that helps give some insight!
I wasn’t sure about Lossy, but since the only way to try it is to buy it (and maybe return it) I decided to give it a shot, and I’ve ended up really liking it. For the way I use these pedals the only meaningful overlap is Lossy’s packet loss and Ribbons’s dropouts, and that just means I can use Lossy’s packet repeat mode and still have dropouts courtesy of Ribbons. The main way these two pedals are totally complementary in my use of them involves Lossy’s slushy freeze and Ribbons’s Disintegration Loop touch mode. The sound of Lossy’s slushy freeze is very similar to the sound of a Loop that has been Disintegrating for a while, and having a loop disintegrating while Lossy provides an eerie preview of that disintegration is very pleasing to me. In this case, I have Ribbons running into Lossy; at first I had them the other way around, and it sounded good, but having Ribbons first makes more sense to me. I guess it makes more conceptual sense, right? I mean, I have cruddy MP3s I’ve made of old tapes, but I don’t know if I’ve ever taped a cruddy MP3. Though typing that out made me remember that, yes, I taped some streaming stuff off of a website in 2002 or so. 
I have both and also the generation loss mkii, Ribbons rules among them. Ribbons is the most versatile, all the similar features in lossy doesn’t sound as good as the ones in ribbons, but the ones on lossy are amazingly selected and essential to create the lossy sound. So the rev is awfully good, having the LPF and HPF in one knob is perfect for the ramp fx, compression and gate are cool but not practical because the hidden menu.
Ribbon is a Swiss Knife. It’s a keeper for sure.