Old Blood Noise Endeavors Parting

Made in collaboration with YouTube artist Emily Hopkins, this unique pedal can do weird and wonderful things — and it’s by no means limited to guitars!

Classically trained harpist and composer Emily Hopkins has built a huge YouTube following. Her videos fuse harp with guitar pedals and other electronic music devices, and her unique blend of competence, experimentation and playful discovery makes them fascinating and fun to watch. Emily has demo’ed and reviewed countless guitar pedals so it’s not surprising that she’s decided to release her own. Called the Parting, this pedal is a collaboration with Old Blood Noise Endeavors, and aims to bring all of Emily’s favourite effect themes and textures into one simple and illuminating pedal, designed for harp, guitar or anything else you’d like to plug into it. For the purposes of this review, I’m going to approach it from a desktop synthesizer perspective...

Overview & First Impressions

The Parting is probably best described as an ambient glitch delay, but that’s not the half of it. In this ice cream sundae of a pedal, you get a scoop of pitch and amplitude modulation, two scoops of probability‑based delay and smeared reverb, some filter sprinkles, a squirt of reverse delay sauce, and a dollop of whipped bit‑crushing cream, all driven through with a chocolate flake of glitchy pitch‑shifting and beat repeats. It’s a delicious mix of sweetness and unexpected texture that tickles your taste buds before flickering into chaos and degrading into gooiness. So, spoons at the ready: let’s dig in!

The rear panel labels may be hard to read on this image, but upside‑down text makes a lot more sense when you’re positioned in front of the pedal and looking down at the back!The Parting’s format and connectivity is similar to many Old Blood pedals. Physically, it’s a nicely robust chunk of pedal, with two soft‑touch footswitches, 10 knobs, and a few buttons. On the back are quarter‑inch stereo in and out sockets, MIDI in/out on TRS, an expression pedal input, and a USB port that, currently, is unused. Power comes from a standard pedal 9V DC supply, and there’s no battery compartment. It’s available in three colours and features artwork by James Roo that leans into the pedal’s chaotic and dismantling vibe. Very cool, but a bit busy for my tastes — Emily recently addressed this by releasing a much calmer, minimalist version!

I find the best way to start evaluating any new effects box is simply to plug in and start playing. The results from this one are tremendous. Just slapping some synth lines through, you get unexpected repeats, ratchets, and lots of wobbles. Echoes seem to come from nowhere, then leap haphazardly in pitch, only to be smeared out of existence. With more extreme knob twists, the sound descends into bit‑farts and crinkles, but these can quickly be pulled back into something approaching clarity.

I patched the Parting into my modular rig for a couple of casual gigs, and it made...