Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing

The Old Blood Noise Endeavours Bathing is what its maker calls a "liminal delay": a delay pedal that sits in the borderland between delay, phaser and reverb. Old Blood Noise describes it as "perhaps a reverb, or a phaser, or a classic delay, but never exactly any one of these things. It's a style of effect unique to the Old Blood lineup"¹. Guitar.com's reviewer put it more technically: "Technically, it's between a delay, a phaser and a reverb"².

The circuit is digital: a digital delay modulated in several complex ways by a resonant LFO in the feedback loop, with extra pitch modulation². The dry signal is kept analog via analog dry-through³. The design expands on the "phase repetition" idea from Old Blood Noise's Dweller pedal, turned into a stereo unit with presets and MIDI³⁴.

A delay that sits between phaser and reverb

The Bathing's behavior depends heavily on where the Time knob sits. With Time very short, the LFO acts like a modulation effect, producing phaser or flanger sounds. With Time set longer, the repeats scatter anywhere from a single repeat at the central delay time out to many diffused repeats around that time⁴. Fewer stages create tight, flanged tones, while longer times and more stages generate cascading repeats both before and after the central delay⁴.

Guitar.com's reviewer, Cillian Breathnach, described what happens at longer delay times: "When you set the delay time longer, the LFO starts to pull your repeated signal apart, leading to cascading, marble-down" sounds, with repeats phasing outwards and orbiting the main delay time². Gearnews noted the range of characters available: "it can sound like a granular, like a phase-y room reverb, and even like the most spaced-out, analog delay"⁶. Delicious Audio groups its modes as delay, phaser/flanger, and multi-tap reverb with diffused, scattered echoes⁵.

The pedal is the third installment of Old Blood Noise's Square series⁶, and Guitar Pedal X describes it as taking the "phase repetition" of the Dweller and massively expanding it into a stereo unit combining delay, modulation and reverb in one box³.

The controls

The maker's product page lists the control set¹:

The Filter knob is wide ranging: depending on its position, repeats can wash out into underwater bassiness or sharpen into walkie-talkie crackle, with neutral in the middle². The LFO wave shapes are described as very impactful, ranging from a standard sine to disorienting sawtooths².

Two footswitches handle bypass and tap tempo, with enough room between them to be hit individually². The Tap/Aux switch taps in tempo, holds for infinite feedback, or can optionally serve as a preset switcher¹. Expression control is available over every knob¹.

Stereo, MIDI and connections

The Bathing is a stereo pedal that can work fully mono, fully stereo, or in MISO (mono in, stereo out)². In Mono-in, Stereo-out and full stereo modes, the LFO is offset across the left and right channels to create a variety of stereo effects⁴. Stereo connections are accessed via TRS jacks².

The rear panel carries In (TS/TRS), Out (TS/TRS), MIDI In, MIDI Out, USB-C, Expression, and 9V DC power at 350mA³. MIDI control covers everything in the pedal, including MIDI clock in and out for external syncing¹, and presets can be saved and recalled via footswitch or MIDI⁵. Guitar.com's reviewer appreciated that all of the I/O, expression jack and MIDI included, sits in one place².

The pedal uses Old Blood's newest enclosure format: a slightly sloped bent-steel enclosure with an overhang on the front side². It ships in three colorways, Algae (the standard finish), Orchid, and Ink¹³⁴.

What reviewers said

Guitar.com's review rated the Bathing 8 out of 10. The reviewer's verdict praised the gorgeous sounds and art, the totally unique signal path, and the extensive I/O and MIDI support, while noting that sounds can get quite extreme quite quickly and that a couple of the controls are fiddly². He found the pedal "indeed pretty unique and intriguing," with hours of noodling lost in use, and said it "makes good on the promise of being 'liminal'" with profoundly strange and evocative sounds from a totally weird signal chain². The artwork he called "a gorgeous illustration that to me evokes the clean lines and abandoned fantasy visuals of something like Hyper Light Drifter"².

Gearnews wrote that the Bathing "offers sounds and effect possibilities you get nowhere else"⁶. Guitar Pedal X found the overview details a little skinny without the manual but still called it a very compelling effect, highlighting its wide control set, low noise floor and expansive stereo field³.

Compared with the Chase Bliss Habit

Guitar.com's reviewer grouped the Bathing with the Chase Bliss Habit as effects that resist easy categorization². Where the Bathing's LFO can be stopped dead at position zero or pushed to audio-frequency, ring-mod levels on max², the Habit takes a different approach to delay, and the reviewer treated the two as pedals that sit outside the usual categories rather than as direct rivals².

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