I had lunch with friends today and mentioned that I’d once made a logo that had a panda in it for no apparent reason. The logo also featured red writing because I wanted to recognise that the black and white panda—clearly my favourite—had a relative known as the Red Panda. The fact that the logo I’d made was for a marketing department that had nothing to do with pandas was irrelevant*. That’s fitting really, because this introduction has absolutely nothing to do with this week’s wishlist pedal.
Well I suppose I could reference the fact that the manufacturer of this week’s pedal is called Red Panda. That may give the introduction some context. The fact that this week’s pedal is named Context probably helps too.
What do you know? I made it work. To the article!
The Red Panda Context pedal is quite the versatile reverb (and more) pedal. You can choose between room, hall, cathedral, gated and plate settings as well as an additional delay setting. To add to the complexity, the pedal has a delay knob which can be utilised with any of the standard reverb settings. Added to the delay setting though, this pedal becomes quite funky.
Funky is a very helpful descriptor I have discovered.
Apart from the reverb selector and the delay knob, the Context pedal features blend, decay and damping knobs. These allow you to dial in quite beautiful reverb tones to be quite honest. The official video is proof of this (all applied to clean guitar tones).
Beautiful sounds. Beautiful looking pedal while I’m reusing adjectives. I love the design of the pedal with its perfectly placed sound waves.
As with many good pedals, the Red Panda Context is true-bypass, is made in the USA and requires 9v power—and not the battery kind because that’s SO 20th century.
I could embed quite a few more videos of auditory awesomeness—because there are many—but I’ll just provide one more link to the Red Panda Context website because it has some of the best examples embedded already. Go. Why are you still reading this?!
* All of this really happened. I’m not smart enough to make this stuff up.
Disclaimer: I’ve not played this guitar pedal. I have not experienced first-hand the sound or effects of this guitar pedal. That doesn’t matter. It looks awesome, it’s obviously played by winners and I want one.