future impact pedal Future Impact Bass Synthesizer

future impact pedal Future Impact Bass SynthesizerIn the mid 90s, electronic music manufacturer Akai Professional took a detour from their typical product offerings of samplers & workstations and released a series of dedicated effect pedals for Guitar & Bass. Among these pedals was a ruby colored gem called the SB 1 Deep Impact designed for use with Bass Guitar, the Akai Deep Impact contained a variety of fat, funky Synth Bass sound presets that were user tweakable and more importantly infinitely

In the mid-90’s, electronic music manufacturer Akai Professional took a detour from their typical product offerings of samplers & workstations and released a series of dedicated effect pedals for Guitar & Bass.

Among these pedals was a ruby-colored gem called the SB-1 Deep Impact – designed for use with Bass Guitar, the Akai Deep Impact contained a variety of fat, funky Synth-Bass sound presets that were user-tweakable and - more importantly – infinitely usable in a variety of musical settings.

While the Deep Impact failed to make an immediate impression, the aftershock continued to rumble long after the pedal was discontinued.  Many high-profile Pros swore by the D.I. as their “go-to” box for creating fat, analog-esque Synth sounds with their Bass Guitars.  Notable Deep Impact users include Mike Gordon of Phish, Paul Taylor of Jamiroquai, and Chris Wolstenholme of Muse.

The rarity and functionality of the Deep Impact coupled with these posthumous celebrity endorsements soon pushed prices on the vintage market well up near the $1000 mark.

Fortunately, Panda MIDI has resurrected the sounds and spirit of the Akai Deep Impact in an all-new pedal that is more powerful, more feature-laden and yet costs less – introducing the Future Impact Mk. I!

The Future Impact circuit combines large effect processing blocks (see the algorithm block diagrams at the bottom of this page), with an extensive set of synthesizer blocks (oscillators, filters, and envelope generators) to create classic Moog-type monophonic synthesizer sounds with their characteristic fat low-end.  The effect processing and synthesizing architectures complement each other in very flexible ways.

Although voiced the same, the hardware and the software of the Future Impact bears no relationship to the hardware and software of the Deep Impact. While the Deep Impact was based on 20th century technology, the Future Impact incorporates state-of-the-art processing that can perform operations more than one hundred times faster than its predecessor. This truly marks it as a Bass pedal for the 21st century.

In spite of the huge processing power the device only draws 70mA from a standard 9V stabilized supply (PA-9 Power-All recommended).

While the Deep Impact only had 9 non-programmable preset sounds (just the major parameters could be edited on stage), the Future Impact I. has 99 program slots that are fully programmable with the desktop PC editor. As a bonus, all major parameters are still user-editable in real time, just like the original!