Tone Report Weekly Issue 99 | Page 66

ELECTROHARMONIX SILENCER REVIEW BY ERIC TISCHLER STREET PRICE $57.60 Picture this: your amp is at 11, your favorite dirt pedal is pumping glorious gain to help you chug through some gnarly riffs, and your bros are looking at you like you’re rocking like you’ve never rocked before. There’s just one thing— you’re buzzing worse than a hive of angry mutant bees from a movie on the SyFy channel. All that volume and gain is making your rig hiss to the point where it covers up the nuance of your band’s unexpected, free form jazz odyssey. So, what to do? Roll back the volume? Turn down the gain? Join a Simon and Garfunkle cover band? 66 GEAR REVIEW // Those are certainly viable options, but there’s another solution that is more conducive to rocking (not a knock on S&G, I’m a big fan): a noise gate. Electro-Harmonix brings you an entry into said category with the Silencer, a noise gate and effects loop designed to give you noise reduction when necessary. It’s a compact box roughly the size of its Nano pedal siblings, so you should be able to find space for it on your board. Three controls—Release, Threshold, and Reduction— allow you to integrate the unit into your rig. Threshold adjusts the level necessary Electro-Harmonix Silencer to allow a signal to pass through the noise gate, Reduction regulates the gated signal and goes from -70db to +4db. Per EHX specs, release time is variable between eight milliseconds and four seconds. You can use the Silencer inline in your effects chain or select a group of pedals to control using the included effects loop. Lately, I’ve been using a Stratocaster quite a bit, and the single coils are prone to that notorious 60-cycle hum that we all dread. The Silencer is quite effective at taming that noise, enabling quiet, delicate passages to be just that—no nasty