Floating Forest The Drifter

Floating Forest's The Drifter is an echo/tremolo pedal, a combination of delay and tremolo in one box with what Delicious Audio called "a luminous twist." It drew attention as a new pedal at the 2017 edition of the Brooklyn Stompbox Exhibit, where the maker showed it to the public for the first time¹.

What it does

The pedal pairs an echo circuit with a tremolo, the effect that rhythmically varies a note's volume. The tremolo side is controlled through regular speed and depth knobs, the two controls players know from any tremolo pedal¹.

The twist is how the tremolo is produced. Instead of only an electronic gain stage, The Drifter uses a photo cell, a light-sensitive component: the cell "closes the filter/volume when it's dark and opens it when it's bright," as Delicious Audio's demo describes it¹. That optical approach ties the tremolo's action to light rather than to a conventional LFO alone, which is what the maker's "luminous twist" refers to¹.

Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio and Tony Artusa demonstrated the pedal in a video from the exhibit, noting that it "arouse a lot of curiosity" among players at the show¹.

The Drifter is an echo/tremolo from Floating Forest, a pedal that drew attention when it was shown as a new release at the 2017 edition of the Brooklyn Stompbox Exhibit¹. Its tremolo side is controlled by the usual speed and depth knobs, but with a twist: a photo cell closes the filter/volume when it's dark and opens it when it's bright, so light reaching the cell shapes the effect¹.