If your guitar playing or guitar sound has become boring and predictable and your search for new musical paths has led you nowhere, sometimes all it takes is a little change down at foot level to breathe new life into your approach. Adding a new gadget or swapping a few things around can always lead to unexpected and delightful surprises. Pulling the proverbial rug out from under your comfortable pedalboard can be a fantastic way to unleash an avalanche of creativity. The problem for most of us long-time pedal junkies is that we already have a pretty clear picture of what various pedal combinations will do even before patching them together and nailing a sound in our heads is just a simple matter of applying the right pedal or pedals to the sonic palette. It's a case of having spent way too much time hunched over our pedals in search of yet another great sound.

Well, look no further than Death by Audio's Total Sonic Annihilation to obliterate all you ever thought you knew and loved about your guitar pedals. Upon first glance, the TSA looks harmless enough. One large function knob, an offset stomp switch, a status led and a striking silkscreened design adorn the top of a textured aluminum box. On the TSA's sides there are well placed input, output, send and return jacks. Flip the TSA over and you'll find four clear rubber feet and four screws that open up to a cleanly wired interior and a nine volt battery. The actual electronics inside look as simple as can be, without a transistorized chip or circuit board in sight. At this point, I was starting to question the menacing name of this pedal.

By itself the TSA isn't capable of a whole lot. It depends solely on the sounds, settings and gain levels of other pedals routed through its effects loop to make it come alive. Once the TSA is engaged, the old pedals you thought you knew so well become something drastically different if not totally demented. Fuzz pedals break into turbulent tones, phasers turn into droid-like blips, choruses sound like clanging car crashes, reverbs howl like short wave transmissions and timid digital delays feedback and oscillate into deafening fizzles. These abrupt personality changes in your pedals takes a serious turn for the worse when you start chaining pedal combinations together within the TSA's perverted signal path.

Sounds completely chaotic doesn't it? Well out of this clattering chaos comes some semblance of order as the noises and screeches actually start forming really cool rhythmic patterns and amazing grooves. Once the gurgles, hisses and bleeps started sounding interesting we actually tossed our guitar aside and found ourselves hunched over our pedalboards twiddling knobs, adjusting inputs, maxing outputs, and spinning rate knobs. Small changes within the pedal chains yielded endless amounts of new sounds, pulses, and sweeps. We won't even begin to list all the various pedal combinations we tried with the TSA because space won't allow it. Let's just say that a shelf full of crusty pawnshopped pedals all ready for Ebay suddenly became interesting again when paired up with the TSA. Talk about breathing new life into old gadgets!

The concept behind the TSA is relatively simple. It uses a feedback loop to coax sonic reactions from the pedals hooked into it. True bypass and top-notch components keep your signal toneful when disengaged and the TSA's mysteriously unmarked dial obviously increases the amount of gain passing through the loop. Interesting results took place at all spots on the dial but we had most of our fun between the two and five o' clock range. At these extreme levels, we actually left our guitar leaning against the wall and ended up mic'ing our amp and immediately recorded choice snippets which we later cut up for use as loops and bizarre textures in songs. Sonic explorers, outright noise makers, and experimental recorders will find plenty of uses for the TSA. Steering the Annihilation into more sensible settings prompted us to pick up the guitar again and we actually enjoyed the mellow disruption it inflicted on our overdrive and distortion pedals.

It's exciting to see a eager young company like Death by Audio rise up and shake things up. The concept behind the TSA is clever and the sonic possibilities are virtually endless. Results are refreshingly unpredictable at times and achieving the exact result twice is next to impossible. This type of unruly behavior in a mere pedal is something we need more of. The sheer beauty of the TSA is that it actually uses and abuses other normal pedals into obtaining its subversive goal of...Total Sonic Annihilation!