Malekko Heavy Industry Goatkeeper

The Malekko Heavy Industry Goatkeeper is an all-analog tremolo and sequencer pedal, a redesigned and miniaturized version of the Lightfoot Labs Goatkeeper that Malekko released in 2019¹. Where a standard tremolo turns your volume up and down at one steady rate, the Goatkeeper runs two LFO stages, each with its own speed multiplier and waveform, so it can produce everything from a simple pulse to layered, polyrhythmic patterns¹.

The core of the pedal is an analog tremolo circuit built around a THAT Corp VCA (voltage-controlled amplifier), the same approach Malekko used in its other VCA-based designs². Delicious Audio presented it as a "2-Stage Polyrhythmic Analog Tremolo," and its combination of two stages with selectable waveforms "can produce tremolo sounds from percussive to smooth"².

What it does to your sound

A conventional tremolo gives you one rate and one depth. The Goatkeeper's LFO generation consists of two stages, each with a range of multiplier values and a waveform selection¹. Because each stage can run at a different subdivision of the shared tempo, the two can interact: Pedal of the Day describes the range as "big, fat pulses, tiny blips and bleeps and anything in between," from subtle depth all the way to what its reviewer called "wickedly pulsing and vibrating"¹.

The controls: Rate, Depth, multipliers and waveforms

The front panel keeps the familiar tremolo controls, with a shared Rate knob and Depth control, and adds the two-stage machinery on top of them²³.

The Rate knob is shared between the two stages, and it can be set via external tap tempo². The two 12-position multiplier controls then let you choose the speed of each side's oscillation in note values, whole note, half note, quarter note and so on, which is what makes polyrhythms possible: set one stage to quarter notes and the other to a value that does not divide evenly against it and the two patterns cycle against each other².

The waveform lists differ between sources. Pedal of the Day lists sine, square, pulse, long square, ramp up and ramp down, set individually on each stage¹. Delicious Audio lists sine, saw, ramp, square and pulse on both sides².

Four modes: Sequential, Composite, Modulation and Single

The two stages can run in four modes¹:

• Sequential: The two stages run one after the other; the W1 setting alternates waveform 1 with waveform 2²¹
• Composite: The two stages run simultaneously, and the effective waveform is a polyrhythmic composite of the two; the W2 setting adds its waveform to the W1 waveform²¹
• Modulation: The two stages run simultaneously, and the second waveform modulates the first²
• Single: The W2 setting removes waveform 2 from the signal, leaving a single-stage tremolo²

Sequential and Single behave like a conventional tremolo with one LFO at a time. Composite and Modulation are where the pedal earns its "polyrhythmic" label, since both stages act on the signal at once and the resulting pattern is the interaction of the two²¹.

Tap tempo and syncing

Tempo can be set with the Rate knob or with the Tap/Sync input². The Tap/Sync jack accepts a Malekko Lil' Buddy footswitch for tap tempo control, or an analog clock or metronome signal, so the pedal can be synchronized to other gear rather than tapped by hand². This carries over from the original Lightfoot Labs Goatkeeper 3, whose LFO rate was set by tap tempo requiring two or more taps⁴.

From the Lightfoot Labs Goatkeeper 3 to the smaller Malekko version

The Goatkeeper line began with the Lightfoot Labs Goatkeeper, first released in 2007². The Lightfoot Labs Goatkeeper 3 was an all-analog signal path, tap tempo tremolo and sequencer pedal with customizable waveforms: six standard waveforms plus five more that could be created and saved with a waveform recorder function⁴. That third and final version was limited to just 25 pedals⁵, and it is now out of production, hard to find and expensive⁶.

The Malekko version is a completely redesigned, miniaturized take on the original circuit, released in 2019 in a smaller, pedalboard-friendly size¹³. Pedal of the Day reviewed it as "an excellent reimagining of a classic effect, one that needs to be on more recordings and in more rigs," with what the reviewer considered a reasonable price tag overall¹.

The Goatkeeper and the Subdecay TremCoder

Guitar Pedal X compared the Malekko Goatkeeper with the Subdecay TremCoder as two compact polyrhythmic pattern tremolos, listing the Goatkeeper at £217³. The key difference between them is the circuit: the Goatkeeper is analog, built on a THAT Corp VCA with two analog LFO stages, while the TremCoder is digital²¹. Both aim at the same goal, tremolo patterns beyond a single steady rate, but the Goatkeeper gets there with analog multiplier stages rather than digital pattern programming.

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