Designed with ambient guitarist Andy Othling, the Iota Tone Generator has no input. It plays 5–60 note patterns of its own through the rest of your board.
Old Blood Noise Endeavors has spent more than a decade making pedals that behave like instruments, and with the Iota it has finally built one outright. The Oklahoma City company’s first standalone synth is a monophonic tone generator and note sequencer in a pedal-sized box. It has no input at all: instead of processing your guitar, it sends its own sequences out through the rest of your pedalboard.
Building a pattern starts with a root note, scale intervals and an octave. From there, the Iota works in Root, Scale or Preset mode to create sequences anywhere from five to 60 notes long, which can run forward, in reverse, back and forth, or in random order. Scramble, skip, hold, swing and glide controls keep the patterns moving, and three oscillator wave shapes run from a pure sine through to harmonically rich and bit-crushed tones.
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The envelope section offers three shapes, ranging from a fast attack and slow release to a slow swell with a quick fade, along with three lengths and a mix control. Elsewhere there’s a white noise blend, an octave switch and a pitch vibrato control for some wobble. One footswitch starts and stops the sequencer, and the AUX footswitch changes the speed, dividing or multiplying it anywhere from a quarter-time to four times as fast.
OBNE has given the Iota plenty of connectivity for a small box. It has 12 onboard presets, with 127 more available over MIDI, and MIDI in and out, USB-C and an expression input. The company has also released a matching Iota Ramper expression pedal for hands-free movement.
The Iota was designed in collaboration with Andy Othling, and OBNE hand-builds it in Oklahoma. It’s pitched as much at tabletop setups as at floor rigs, and it comes in Zenith Silver, Vintage Yellow and Groovy Blue. It arrives alongside the Float V2, an updated version of OBNE’s dual analogue filter that now has MIDI, presets and an AUX footswitch.
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