Anasounds Ages

The Anasounds Ages is a harmonic tremolo pedal from French maker Anasounds, part of the company's Origins series, where Anasounds describes it as their "dynamic harmonic tremolo"¹. Where a standard tremolo pulses the whole volume of your guitar up and down, the Ages splits the signal into two tremolos running in parallel, one letting the high frequencies pass while the other handles the lows, so the two halves breathe against each other instead of the whole sound dropping together¹. Anasounds calls harmonic tremolo "one of the rarest and most interesting effects" and built the Ages as a hybrid pedal that keeps "a purely analog signal path" while offering tap tempo, subdivisions and dynamics control².

Guitar World's reviewer Peter Hodgson places the sound in familiar territory: the Ages is "Anasounds' take on a sound that you might know under one of a number of names: Univibe, harmonic tremolo"³. Delicious Audio adds the historical thread, noting that the first harmonic tremolos, including the Univibe and the built-in vibratos of old Magnatone amps, were designed to emulate the Leslie rotating cabinet⁴.

What harmonic tremolo does differently

A classic tremolo changes the overall volume of the guitar. A harmonic tremolo, an approach first developed in Fender "brown face" amps, instead alternately changes the volume of the bass and treble frequencies⁵. Anasounds explains the circuit simply: "a harmonic tremolo is two tremolos arranged in parallel. One will let the high frequencies pass while the other" cuts the low frequencies alternately¹.

What that means for a player, in Pedal of the Day's words, is that "the motion they produce is somewhat livelier, adding a hypnotic edge and thickness to your tone"⁶. Anasounds positions it against other modulation as well: it "brings a much livelier motion than a tremolo, it doesn't have the outdated stigma of the chorus, and it takes up less" space than delay or reverb².

Controls and tap tempo

The Ages has four knobs: output volume, tone, depth and rhythm subdivision, plus a Tap Tempo footswitch³. There is no rate knob, because "everything is done through" the tap tempo footswitch, which sets the rate directly⁴.

The subdivision knob works on the tapped tempo: the 1st position doubles it, the 2nd leaves it at the tapped speed, the 3rd divides it by 2, and the last divides it by 3¹.

Trimpot mode

Holding the on/off footswitch down for more than two seconds opens Trimpot mode; the LED turns blue and the knobs take on new parameters¹⁴. Delicious Audio calls the Ages "a pedal that looks simple, but that's actually packed with functions"⁴.

In Trimpot mode:

• DEPTH becomes FREE_SUBDIVISION, to fine-tune the timing of the wave⁴
• RATE becomes SYMMETRY, which lets you edit the shape of the LFO wave⁴
• Tone becomes Envelop (Pedal of the Day notes the spelling), which acts as an Attack detector⁶
• The LFO switch gets 3 additional shapes: a random shape, sin(x)+sin(2x), and sin(x)+sin(3x)+sin(5x)⁴

Inside the pedal, two Gain trimpots let you adjust saturation separately for treble and bass⁶.

The attack detector and the Spinner

The Ages' standout feature is its attack detector, which makes the settings of each tremolo react to the dynamics of your signal¹. A 3-position toggle decides what the attack influences: at the top it changes the speed of the tremolo, in the middle it has no influence, and at the bottom it changes the depth¹. You choose whether it impacts the rate or the depth according to how hard you hit the strings².

The pedal also works with Anasounds' Spinner expression controller. In acceleration mode, a hit on the Spinner accelerates the Ages' rate; if the Ages was off, a tap turns it on, and it turns itself off when the Spinner speed drops below a threshold¹.

Guitar World's reviewer found this is where the pedal comes alive: "The Ages sounds like a great Univibe-style effect, but that's only the beginning of it: once you start messing around with" the Attack Detector, it "opens up a whole new world of interactivity, making the effect part of what you play overall"³.

Buying it

The Ages is listed by Anasounds at 279,00 EUR². It can also be purchased as a DIY kit⁴.

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