At some point, all of us spill out of our racks into a motley assortment of pedals and effects boxes. I’m not sure what triggers it, but maybe you found yourself deep into a patch wishing you had a flanger module, and it occurred to you that you had an Electro‑Harmonix Deluxe Electric Mistress sitting over in your guitar case. Before you know it, you’ve stolen some headphone adaptors, messily wired it into your patch, and are left fighting with distorted and deliciously wobbling audio, wondering why you never did this before and how you can do it better.

Into the chaos of mismatched levels and dodgy adaptors steps the P1 from DPW Design. The P1 is a beautifully designed, two‑channel pedal interface that sets the level and gives you the right connections to and from your pedals. There’s no setup and no tweaking. The surface is devoid of knobs or controls, so there’s nothing you can do to mess it up. You might pause briefly to give your brain time to comprehend the meaning of the weird yellow hieroglyphs, but other than that, you’re good to go.

The P1 is designed to be sympathetic to guitar tone and do all it can to make the transition from Eurorack levels to instrument levels as smooth as possible. The P1 is AC‑coupled, keeping out any flat voltages or offsets. It has more than 100kHz bandwidth in both directions. The inputs are Hi‑Z and include soft, controlled, symmetrical clipping to reign in wayward signals with some very friendly colour.

Compared to guitar level, Eurorack is around 18dB hotter and so the job of the P1 is to sort out that disparity. When interfacing to pedals, a 5V Eurorack signal (+14dBV) will give you ‑4dBV at the pedal side. When going the other way, guitars don’t tend to be quite as well‑behaved and often have edges and transients that push beyond the expected ‑4dBV. The soft‑limiting starts to kick in at this point and reaches full compression and symmetrical brickwall limiting at +6dBV to a maximum of ±10V on the Eurorack side.

The P1 is a simple, thoughtful module that’ll bridge the gap between your modular and guitar worlds.

In use, the P1 sets up a perfectly good effects loop or two through whatever pedals you want to play with. The lack of fuss is quite refreshing, and all you have to contend with is having four chunky guitar leads poking out of your rack. I suggest putting it at the edge of a case and using some right‑angled ones. It’s a brilliantly useful way to bring some alternative vibes into your modular. Going the other way lets you use your modular as a massive guitar effects processor. This is where you start to appreciate the soft‑limiting and tone of the P1. My twin‑humbucker semi‑acoustic really appreciates the fuzzy edges, my acoustic is clean, and my Telecaster sounds like a guitar should sound before it hits the chaos of CV‑modulated effects.

The P1 is a simple, thoughtful module that’ll bridge the gap between your modular and guitar worlds, making both all the richer for it.

£120

www.dpw.se

$129

www.dpw.se