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?
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GEAR REVIEW
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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