Alesis Philtre

My biggest test for ease of use is time between opening the box and getting a usable sound. It rates high on that. Obviously a knowledge of filters and such helps, as does reading the manual. The manual also provides some pretty decent settings to start with.

It does use up over 800 mA of power, which even if you can plug it into a daisy chain, would take up over half of most daisy chain's power. Not an option for me when I've already got 9 pedals on my 1 spot. -1 for that.

The footswitch jack does allow use of an external switch, but it's set up for a momentary switch, so i either have to buy one of those or double tap my footswitch to turn the effect on and off. Better than putting this delicate piece of plastic on the floor, but still it looses a point for that.

The dials have slightly odd labels to them, but not obnoxiously mislabled like some DOD pedals from a few years back.

But the biggest plus is the tempo-syncing feature. Other pedals should use this, it syncs to your strumming pattern or drum beat or whatever you have running through it. Beats the hell out of using a tap tempo switch.

The bypass could be better on modfx, but I've got a decent buffer, which helps. There's also a bit of white noise, which the trim dial helps reduce. I can get some decent abient sounds, auto wah/envelope filter, and even a pseudo-phase sound. It'll probably become a mainstay on my rig.

A previous poster complained he wanted a great sound, not a decent one. If you want a great sound, I suggest dropping a bit more change on your effects. $30 on clearance, I can't complain. I give it a 9 because even though it could sound better, the price can't be beat.

Cheap plastic. High power draw. I doubt this thing is very reliable. Luckily, I've got a wah pedal and envelope filter on my board, as well as phase and flange effects, so if it failed I'd have a backup.

It's discontinued, so I doubt I'll get much support.

Whenever I spend this little on gear, it's usually for one of two things, either to get a what-the-heck-is-that sound or it's just an experiment. This will get that occasional weird sound, and it didn't break the bank. I give it a 10 if you can find one for a decent price.

First off, I LOVE this thing.
As easy as a resonant filter can be.
I only flunked it because I could not plug it into the existing standard 9V power plugs that my other effects use. It needs its own wall transformer.
It was also kinda lame to make up new names for all of the classic terms.
Example
frequency="phreeq"
Resonance="regen"
you get the idea. I say this name changing is okay with distortion pedals, but filters are serious, and hard to understand for alot of people. You have to picture graphs in your head to really get the full use out of this thing.

You have to tweak!! But they do provide setting examples in the manual and online.

Just one prob. No standard power adapter. This means you can't hook it up into your pedal-power daisy chain like you can with say a Morely wah pedal. You have to use a separate wall wart transformer! When are these designers gonna get the message. STANDARDIZE STANDARDIZE STANDARDIZE. This will hurt them on "ease of use". I need to send a message

I use a Gibson flying V, marshall preamp, a mesa simul395 and a peavey cab.
Let me just say that I looked for this sound for 3 months. All of the other filters out there are lacking one important element; LOW FREQUENCY OSCILLATOR. Tremolos have them, flangers have them, phasers have them... why not filters?

Most artists use LFO controlled filters like this in studio and apply it to the entire mix, rather than just guitar. Enrique Igleias uses it in "You CAnt Escape My love" and Kylie Minougue(sic) uses it in "Love at first sight". It is a rare effect. One of the rarest when used right. It is actually responsible for many effects by other names. This pedal is the only affordable way to get this sound.

I think it is 28 bit, 48khz sound. IT's not analog and there is no true bypass so use an a/b switch! IT also seems to be very energy inefficient. Gets hot and apparently sucks up almost a whole ampre of current!! --More than all of my other effects combined, even my homemade tube preamp--not counting the filaments of course;)

I put distortion before it and a little compression after and some reverb on top and I set the LFO all the way down for the most majestic sound ever. Screw all that envelope controlled trendy crap like the q-tron, the automatic filter, the synth wah and countless others. This was less than half the price and it can do it all. It is a moog synthesizer without a tone generator.

Now these were manufactured and then discontinued. The capacitors may squeal a but when you first fire it up, but it goes away. Leave it on for a few hours.

The button is so close to the knobs that I inevitably screw up the delicate settings and end up sounding like a wah-wah trumpet instead of a desert wind (welcome to the world of synths).
Again, I recommend having two of these and an a/b/y switcher.
IF this thing lasts, I'll be surprised. The un-usually high energy consumtion indicates a speedy development period--which is good for alesis and bad for us.

Well, it is a discontinued piece of equipment, so I don't expect much.

I love this thing. Eveything has been covered now.
It beats everyhthing else if not by ability then by price.

I am no filering whiz, but it did not seem to take too long before I was well on my way to making the most of hte "sample/hold" mode with the high pass, band pass, and low pass settings ... however, the other possilibites are still a bit of a mystery.

As another reviewer noted, this device can pretty much emulate the sounds of much pricier filter units ... the Xotic Robotalk especially comes to mind here for me. I detected no unwanted noise with my unit and it seemed to respond quite well with distortion after it in the chain (think hardcore industrial music).

It is at least 80% plastic ... and not the most confidence inspiring kind.

Discontinued ... so?

I think that this has honestly been the best $35 I have spent on a processing device to date. It may not be true bypass or analog, but the Philtre is well worth its current clearance price, IMHO.

Knowledge of filtering is a must, manuel provides a decent crash course into theory and practics. Getting a decent (let alone great) sound can take a lot of work and engineering expertise.

I'm using this unit with my guitar. Am Tele Plus -> Vox Wah (true bypass) -> Full Drive 2 -> HAO Rust Driver -> DD 5 into a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. Introduces a good amount of noise in the higher frequencies. After a few hours of work, I achieved a decent envolope and vibrato. Sample and hold is also an interesting function. The problem is I don't want a decent sound, I want a great sound. Without adding noise to my signal chain.

Well, I couldn't get a sound I was willing to take to a gig, so I can't really comment on this one.

I play alot of pop rock, and was hoping to achieve a "what the heck is that" tone. As mentioned before, it did a decent job at this, but not good enough. Won't have the opportunity for theft: I returned it for an E Bow.

I don't know yet but it seems to be fairly well made.

I got the Alesis Philter and I'm pretty happy with how it sounds on my Korg X5D. (I haven't done a side-by-side comparison with my Electrix Filter Queen yet but I already can tell that for some things, the Philtre holds its own.) As someone mentioned in a review at another site,the Philtre's lowpass filter does seem to cut some low-end out of bass sounds (not a good thing!) but it also seems to improve some other sounds. e.g. the resonance really helps brass patches and the LP filter & resonance really bring Prophet VS bell patches to life on my Korg X5D.

I wish it had key-tracking and "patch memory" but for the price, I can't complain - The resonance is a nice touch on some of my X5D's sounds. The steeper filter (8 pole?) especially makes some nice effects.

Very easy to use. No patches - it's all there in front of you and changeable in real time. Manual is good. Also, it will automatically sync to your playing within 15 percent of the tap tempo + or -. Very nice feature. And setting it to tap tempo is a breeze. There's even a knob that changes the multiple of the tap tempo, so you can get 2X, 4x, 1/2 and 1/4 as well as what you originally input with the twist of a knob. Great little box for the right application. It's stereo, too. Nice. 6 different modes of modulation to pick from. Most of them will sync to tap tempo. Some are NA. There's an input trim knob on the back and a footswitch jack for bypass. Comes with a power supply - wall wart - so you don't have to worry about batteries. If you are not using tap tempo you can change the filter speed with the knob through all it's range which is also very nice for certain kinds of stuff.

I'm using this on a pair of Casio VZ-10m's into my mixer and then into other effects and ultimately into my computer. These synths have no filters. This little gem has given them a new lease on life. The filter has to be played with for a bit to see how it performs. Not everything sounds good with certain sounds. Also, if you have the band pass real narrow or the frequency wrong for your patch, you will find some notes suddenly don't exist - the Philtre is filtering them into oblivion. So, you need to use some common sense. That said, I love this thing! It has quite a range of sound and is so easy a monkey could run it. I had been about ready to sell those VZ-10m's as without filters the sound control just isn't up to date. But, big but here, with this little box you can get amazing stuff out of them. I think it actually adds some dynamic depth and warmth to the signal - which they could have used anyway. I've never heard bass coming out of them like this before. Very nice sound. It has 2 and 8 pole filters. Low Pass, High Pass, Band Pass and Band Stop (opposite of band pass). Overall I was very positively impressed. If I'd paid 150$ I might be a bit less happy and more critical, but at a blowout price of 35$ - this is a major steal. Still, it can't compete with something like a Sherman. But, the sound quality seems quite high. Sampling is at 48, so it isn't shabby. You might want to try running your gear through this after the reverb, though. Seems to do some weirdness that reverb doesn't like a whole lot on occasion. But, I haven't tried this yet. I can't give it a 10 because some settings just don't seem to be useable. But, in somebody else's hands maybe they would be. The first night I set it up I played with this thing straight for about 6 hours.

Seems Ok, but I have not had it a long time. Looks pretty solid, but it is definitely a desktop device. It's no good for guitars unless you have a table close by... Not real practical. But for keyboards - no problem. The knobs are pretty good feeling. Plastic, but not really cheap feeling. The base is metal. The buttons give good clicks, so you can feel what you do.

No idea

For what I'm using it for - this is great. Really hard to express how much of a difference it has made on those synths. Kind of brought them out of the stone age and into the 21st century. Nobody who has used one of these synths would believe it was the same synth. For the price you can't go wrong. If you play keyboards, you can find a use for this - no question about it. If you already have a Sherman filterbank then why are you reading this? I do wish it had a jack for expression control. As it is, if you want to modulate it in real time you have to have a hand free. No way around it. Biggest drawback I can see.

THis is an upate and rvision. Somehow, I don;t remember giving this pedal a "6" for sound quality. And now that I've played it some more I feel I have to adjust the numbers.

A wide variety of sounds. Will require tweaking time, since the controls are interactive. It is a digital resonant filter unit, about the size of a Voodoo Labs pedal, except sideways, it is plastic, very light, but seems solid - no rattles. Will not take batteries, runs on a 9VAC wall wart (included) and draws a whopping 830mA. Stereo ins and outs, trim nob on the back to adjust the incoming line level. It also has a footswitch jack which will respond to a standard momentary switch, like a keyboard sustain pedal. This is good because the on/off (bypass) switch is a button and not a footswitch. (Unless you have teeny, tiny prehensile toes)

This unit, like the other ModFx units is designed to be used as either a desktop module or rack-mounted in groups of three. It has a male and a female 9-pin connector on the sides so you can directly connect to another ModFx unit. If you set up 3 of them in one rack space, you could run your cable into the first and out of the third without the need for additional cables to each box.

The Philtre ModFx has four different filters - high pass, low pass, band pass and band stop. There are two versions of each filter - 2 pole or 8 pole, which you switch between by use of the Steep button. The unit has 4 tweakable parameters - Rate, Depth, Phreeq ("cute" word for freguency), and Regeneration (resonance). In addition the Philtre has five modulation wave forms - triangle, sample/hold, triggered, envelope, and pattern. The unit has tap tempo and beat synced fx. MIDI would be nice. Saveable programs would also be nice.

I used my Tele and ran the unit to a mixer and through a power amp and also direct to a 30watt George Dennis Tube amp. I was less than impressed with the sounds through the mixer-amp setup, but I did not have the recomended TRS jack for the mixer insert. Then I tried it direct to the tube amp. All right!

This box will do auto-wah, slow (I mean real slow) sweeps, speedy warbles, up and down sweeps, triggered "bursts" of fast attack frequency filtering, envelope sensitive filtering, notch filtering, a random sequenced wah (with a repeating 16 step pattern or completely random patterned frequency modulation), and subtle or window rattling noises.

The basic LFO is a triangle waveform. The "Phreeq" sets the corner frequency of the high and low pass filters and the center frequency of the band pass and band stop filters. The controls are interactive - changing one may change the effect of another, but the manual does a reasonable job of explanation. The Envelope mode is basically an "up sweep" and the Trigger is the "down sweep."

Some of the modulation rates can be set with tap tempo (triangle wave, sample/hold, and pattern). Just tap the button and an LED will flash at your desired tempo and the effect will cycle at that rate. The unit is supposed to also respond to a steady input signal, and it is supposed to adjust as your tempo drifts. In Tap mode the rate control acts as a multiplier of the tap tempo, not an independent rate control.

How does it sound? Very good, surprisingly good. I compared it to my Qtron. The Qtron is probably warmer and grittier. The Philtre has more options, more "tweaks" and can get sounds not available from the Qtron - like the very long slow wide sweeps I associate with boxes like the Korg MS20, or the random arpeggiator/step-wah/seq-wah patterns like the Oberheim VCF/Robotalk/SeekWah. Note I say "like," not the same as - this is a 16 step/measure pattern, which is randomly generated each time you select it and repeats itself in pattern mode or continues with random frequency filter steps in sample/hold mode. However, these modes (pattern and sample/hold) can be synced to your tempo, unlike the other units. And using the Rate control when in Tempo sync mode, the pattern can be set from 4 steps/measure to 64 steps/ measure.

It is plastic and digital, which too often means "crap." I'll just have to wait and see. Alesis has made some good stuff over the years - HR16, various 'verbs, the Andromeda. On the other hand you've got the AirFx - fun but useless.

No experience.

So overall -

Pros - good useable filters, lots of tweaks, weird noise potential, pseudo-arpeggiator, tap tempo, stereo. For under $100. (seen advertised for as low as $68 plus shipping)

Cons - digital, plastic box, "cute," not designed as a foot pedal, no MIDI.

One man's opinion.