NEXI Industries Phaser

The NEXI Industries Phaser (PSR-01) is an analog phaser pedal for electric guitar, announced by NEXI Industries in June 2017 with a retail price of $110 USD¹. Premier Guitar's announcement described it as "a throwback to the pedal's earliest days," aimed at players who want the classic phase-shifting sweep without a wall of controls¹.

A phaser splits the guitar signal, shifts the phase of one copy across a range of frequencies, and recombines the two, producing the moving peaks and troughs that give the effect its characteristic sweep. The NEXI Phaser keeps that effect deliberately simple: one knob, true bypass, and power that works either standalone or as part of NEXI's own pedalboard system¹.

What it does

The Phaser produces the sweeping, whooshing modulation of a classic analog phaser. Premier Guitar's announcement framed its two extremes in terms of musical style: turned up to "Fast" it creates an aggressive swirl suited to heavy rock or metal, while turned down to "Slow" it gives a lush sweep the announcement suggested for ballads, reggae, or country¹.

The pedal was designed by boutique effect pedal creators who, in Premier Guitar's words, call themselves the "Vintage Analog Protection Squad," a name that signals the company's positioning around old-school analog circuits rather than digital modeling¹.

The controls

The control set is as simple as a phaser gets: a single knob that increases or decreases the speed of the peaks and troughs of the sweep¹. There is no depth, feedback, or mix control, so the character of the effect is fixed by the circuit and the player shapes it through speed alone.

For comparison, other phasers on the market spread the same job across more controls. The TC Electronic Helix Phaser, for example, carries speed, depth, feedback, and mix knobs², and the Empress Phaser has five knobs and five three-way switches³. The NEXI Phaser sits at the opposite end of that spectrum: fewer decisions at the pedal, at the cost of less fine control over the sweep's intensity and character.

Power: 9V battery or pedalboard supply

The Phaser is what NEXI calls a hybrid pedal: it can be used standalone with a 9V battery, or plugged right into the external power supply of NEXI's pedalboard¹. For a player building a first, small board, the battery option means the pedal works on its own with no power supply to buy; for a player on the NEXI board, the same pedal draws its power from the board's built-in supply rather than its own battery or adapter¹.

This is a different arrangement from pedals that take a battery or a standard 9V DC adapter, like the Retro-Sonic 4-Stage Analog Phaser⁴, and from pedals with no battery option at all, like the Aguilar Grape Phaser, which runs on a universal 9-volt power supply only⁵. The NEXI approach ties the pedal to the company's own board ecosystem while still letting it function on its own.

Questions