Mentha Works Monk Echo

Mentha Works, a newly formed music electronics company from Latvia, introduces its first product: Monk Echo. This grand, expressive reverb and delay pedal blends lush spatial ambience with vocal-like resonance, a powerful set of sound design tools and a groundbreaking Macro Control system that allows players to morph entire soundscapes with a single movement.

Monk Echo offers everything from gentle, angelic echo tails to distorted and self-oscillating wall of sound. At its core lies a duet of high-fidelity reverb and precise delay, carefully mixed and fed into one another. A single Mix control allows players to elegantly navigate between subtle ambient washes and rhythmic, echo-led textures — all the way to infinite sustain.

Drawing inspiration from Baltic choral traditions and mythical acoustic architecture, Monk Echo processes the reverb and delay signal through morphing formant filters tuned to human vocal resonances. Players can:

• Select the vowel the pedal “sings”
• Glide continuously between vowel shapes
• Or enable automatic vowel expression that responds to playing dynamics
• Switch between the voice characters - male, female and children

The result ranges from soft, distant voice-like coloration to full choral swells of monks, altos, and children’s voices echoing through imaginary stone cathedrals. Monk Echo carries the imprint of the human voice - something that sings with you and is not based on static algorithms. It reacts, evolves, and becomes part of your performance.

Instead of fixed algorithms for navigating a wide spectrum of sounds, Monk Echo provides a line-up of carefully tuned sound-shaping tools, each simple on its own but powerful in interaction. As a result it is possible to gradually morph between all sounds at all times, without any abrupt switching between modes. The available sound palette reaches well beyond typical reverb and delay territory.

Controls:

• Reverb/Delay Mix – Blend between reverb and delay
• Delay Time – 1ms metallic to 10s tap/MIDI-synced repeats
• Feedback – From single echo to endless self-oscillation
• Reverse Delay – Instant backward delay playback
• Reverb Pre-Delay – Tempo-linked space and wobble
• Reverb Pitch Grains – Granular pitch shimmer and motion
• Monk Voice – Amount of vocal character in echoes
• Voice Character – Formant shift: deep to airy to childlike
• Vowels – Manual or auto vowel morphing
• Modulation – Classic mod on repeats and tails
• Fluctuation – Dynamic, play-reactive modulation
• Distortion – Satisfying echo breakup and grit
• Degradation – Lo-fi decay and sound loss
• Delay Stereo Width – Mono center to wide ping-pong
• Tone Controls – Shape overall frequency character

Warm tape-style echoes, shimmer verbs, dusty vinyl ambience, resonant formant feedback, crushing distortion - everything is achieved through direct, intuitive controls. The Macro Control system allows players to link multiple parameters to a single control source, making it possible to sweep smoothly between dramatically different sound states. This not only unlocks all the rich texture “in-between” settings that are usually difficult to dial in-it also turns the pedal into an expressive performance instrument. The Macro control can be operated via the dedicated knob, an expression pedal, or the built-in footswitch, allowing players to morph sounds hands-free in real time and react to the moment on stage. To provide immediate visual feedback, every parameter movement - no matter how subtle - is displayed on the 8×8 Dot Display, offering a unique, intuitive, and performance-ready interface unlike anything seen on a guitar pedal before.

Key Features:

• Grand reverb and 1ms – 10s delay
• Formant-based Monk Voice vowel shaping
• Manual or automatic responsive vowel control
• Male, female, and children choir timbres
• Infinite sustain for both reverb + delay
• Reverse delay & granular pitch shifting
• Static or dynamic modulation movement
• Distortion and musical degradation artifacts
• Stereo signal path & variable stereo width
• Expression pedal input with multi-target assignment
• Built-in footswitch + Tap Tempo
• Onboard 8 preset slots
• Full MIDI in/out/thru & 127 presets via MIDI
• USB-C or standard pedal power supply
• Straightforward surface controls with advanced system settings

Monk Echo is available for pre-order now on the website below.

www.mentha.works