Kinotone Sparks

The Kinotone Sparks is a stereo analog sound design pedal: a compact box that combines two distortion circuits, a state-variable filter, a deep modulation section, and a digital synthesizer inspired by the SID chip from the Commodore 64 home computer¹. Kinotone describes it as a toolkit that "can achieve many results ranging from subtle to extreme and aggressive"¹, and Guitar Pedal X listed its capabilities as overdrive, fuzz, high gain, tremolo and oscillation, chip tune synth, auto-wah, volume swells, and warble². It sells for $399 USD³.

Sparks is the follow-up to Kinotone's Ribbons magnetic tape multi-FX, and Guitar Pedal X called it "a fantastically capable Wavefolder Drive, Resonant Filter, Envelope Follower and LFO hybrid Multi-FX" while noting "a hefty learning curve overall"⁴.

What it is and how it shapes your sound

At its core, Sparks is a filter pedal with two distortion stages feeding it. The DRIVE and FOLD control crossfades between two circuits: a unique overdrive and a west-coast-style wavefolder¹. DRIVE, in Kinotone's words, "provides soft sustain and controlled, pleasant clipping," while FOLD is "a complex, liquidy effect that distorts your input signal by inverting and folding the peaks"⁵. The wavefolder approach puts it in different territory from conventional overdrive, distortion or fuzz pedals, which clip the signal rather than fold it back on itself.

The filter is a musical 12dB/octave multimode design, continuously variable between high-pass, band-pass, and low-pass types². The MODE knob "lets you smoothly morph between filter types"¹, so you can sweep from one response to another rather than switching between them.

The main controls

Two footswitches handle the rest: BYPASS engages or disengages the effect, and PRESET engages or disengages your stored preset¹.

The LFO and envelope follower

The modulation section is where Sparks goes beyond a standard filter pedal. You can map the LFO to any knob control, or to several at once, with speeds ranging from super slow well into audio rate¹. Guitar Pedal X gives the LFO rate range as 0.1Hz to 1kHz². Mapped parameters act as attenuverters, so each mapping can be scaled and inverted². The LFO offers sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, sample and hold, and random ramps waveforms, and waveforms can be synchronized to MIDI clock². A RANGE function instantly doubles or quadruples the LFO speed, and SPIN shifts the left and right LFO channels out of phase to create stereo movement².

The envelope follower can likewise be mapped to any knob control or to multiple controls, with adjustable attack and sensitivity². Three envelope styles are available¹:

• Classic: medium attack and release times, inspired by the envelope follower in a famous 1970s semi-modular synthesizer⁵
• Compressor: fast logarithmic attack and medium release times, mimicking the response of the Vinyl Sim compressor, essentially an analog version of the compressor in Ribbons with flexible timing controls⁵
• AR: synthesizer-style envelope¹

Mapping the envelope follower to the filter gives auto-wah and dynamic filter effects; mapping it to BLEND gives volume swells; mapping the LFO to the filter gives tremolo and warble, which is how the Harmonic Tremolo and Auto-Wah factory presets are built².

The SID-inspired synth engine

Sparks includes an internal synthesizer that Kinotone calls its "own unique take on the 6581 SID chip, the synth engine behind the Commodore 64 Home Computer," pairing digital oscillators with the analog filter¹. It offers 4 voices of polyphony with an optional mono mode, plus or minus 5 semitone pitch bending, and modeling of ADSR envelope, hard sync, and ring mod². Controls cover bit depth, pulse width modulation, pitch modulation, and glide². Waveform choices are sine, triangle, sawtooth, pulse, and 23-bit Fibonacci LFSR noise².

Kinotone notes that classic SID chip sounds are often gritty, crunchy, and very lo-fi¹, which places this engine alongside dedicated synth pedals rather than conventional pitch effects. The whole pedal runs on a 170MHz mixed-signal ARM processor².

Power and connections

Sparks runs on a +9VDC, 2.1 mm, negative tip power supply and draws approximately 280mA³.

The pedal passes stereo in and stereo out by default through its TRS input and output jacks, and also supports mono in and stereo out via the mix setting menu¹. The input/output level menu offers four options: instrument in / instrument out (the default), instrument in / boost out, line level in / line level out, and line level in / boost out, the last with a 6 dB boost at the output⁵. That line-level option means Sparks can sit in a studio or mixer path as well as on a pedalboard.

MIDI control works with any controller that has a 5-pin DIN or TRS MIDI output; Sparks defaults to MIDI channel 1 with 16 channels available¹. Internal jumpers switch between TRS MIDI Type A (the factory setting), Type B, or CBA wiring². The CV / EXP input accepts control voltages from 0 to 5 volts¹, with CV control working up to 500Hz², fast enough for audio-rate modulation from an external source. For more on this kind of control, see MIDI pedals and expression pedals.

Specifications from the press

Presets and what reviewers said

Sparks ships with 6 factory presets³: Harmonic Reverse, Gentle Drive, Harmonic Tremolo, Auto-Wah, Crinkled Tape, and Dynamic Envelope Tremolo². The PRESET footswitch engages or disengages your preset¹.

Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson reviewed Sparks at launch and again in the site's roundup of the best new modulation and utility pedals of 2024, where he summed it up as:

The same review flagged "a hefty learning curve overall"⁴, which fits a pedal where any modulation source can be routed to any control. At launch the pedal was available for pre-order from the Kinotone webstore²; the current product page lists it at $399 USD³. The circuit boards are assembled in Minneapolis, MN³.

Videos

Click to load

Click to load

Click to load

Questions