If you’ve ever awoken in a cold sweat dreaming of synthesizers, we’ve got just the ticket: Lysis. There’s always been something about synth players for which guitarists and bassists alike have yearned. Though they’re essentially the same instrument, the onboard accoutrements are what makes all the difference—oscillators, filters, LFOs; these are the makings of true electronic synthesis, and these are all things we stuffed into the Lysis.

All of the bells and whistles of synths are featured in full within the walls of the Lysis. For starters, the Lysis serves up a specially-designed wave-shaping fuzz circuit. This helps the Lysis sound more like a square wave or sawtooth wave.

Our DSP-controlled polyphonic octave circuit takes all the clang you’ve cooked up and sends it south, to a rich two-voice octave-down synthesizer that tracks one note or 88, all at once. Serve Lysis your longest signal chain on a platter, and it will eat it for breakfast.

The Filter section is where things get really interesting. For starters, the Lysis gives you the option to blend the octave/fuzz section with the filtering, so you can enjoy punishing octave-down fuzz, rich, goopy filter sweeps or anything in between. The Lysis also gives you a switchable high-pass and low-pass filter, along with the option to manually manipulate the filter’s cutoff or have it automatically modulate.

If you choose the manual path, an expression pedal jack gives you hands-free control of the Freq knob, for a sound-bending filter-wah effect that can absorb the impact of the most well-equipped dirt section. Should you choose modulation, the Freq knob controls the rate of the effect. An expression pedal gives you foot control over the speed for some psychedelic guitar freakouts or smooth undulation.

An onboard vibrato circuit finishes off the signal path of the Lysis. When in fixed mode, Lysis kicks in the vibrato, but in modulated mode, a filter LFO is engaged and Mod controls the rate of that. The two-position Warp switch works in tandem with the corresponding footswitch, either maxing or killing the Mod knob depending on the position.

Much more than a mere effect Lysis is rather its own future forward entity, a cellular organism of the sonic variety bursting with possibilities.