Steve Bragg founded Empress Effects in 2005. A guitar player and an engineer, Mr. Bragg developed his first guitar effects pedal for a friend. The pedal was an advanced tremolo design that not only wowed his friend, but also caught the attention of music stores in the area. The rest is history. In the years since that fateful tremolo pedal, Empress Effects has grown and expanded into a pedal powerhouse that builds flexible tools for discerning players worldwide.
Every Empress Effects processor is designed and assembled with pride by a small, elite team in Ottawa, Canada. In fact, Empress is so confident in the quality of its designs that each product includes a complimentary two-year warranty. And if you register that effect on the Empress Effects website, the warranty doubles to a four-year warranty at no extra cost.
If you have a tone in mind, Empress has a pedal to make it happen. The Empress Effects product lineup has some seriously heavy hitters. There are classic all-analog designs, digitally controlled analog pedals, and all-digital signal processors. The company’s offerings include tools for dynamics, EQ, gain, modulation, time-based effects, and so much more. Whatever your genre or style, there’s an Empress Effects pedal for you.
Part of the Empress experience is bringing the studio sound to the stage. That’s one of the reasons the company’s compressor pedals include sidechain inputs and why Empress makes a parametric EQ instead of the typical graphic EQ. Finally, pursuing a studio sound has led Empress Effects to use ultra-premium components for exceptional audio quality and a super-low noise floor.
ZOIA is perhaps the most well-known Empress Effects product. ZOIA packs the workflow of a modular synthesizer and a signal processor into a pedalboard-friendly format. This pedal is ideal for players who aren’t afraid to plumb the sonic depths for new, inspiring sounds. You can use ZOIA as a totally customized effect, a multi-effects pedal, a synthesizer, a sequencer, a sampler, a looper, or even as a MIDI utility box. What’s more, ZOIA has a dedicated user community whose members have created more than 1,200 free patches you can download online.
Empress Effects continues to develop and support its Echosystem, Reverb, and ZOIA products. Those three products have received multiple free updates since their launch, increasing the pedals’ versatility with all-new sounds and functions.
Get your sound your way. Most Empress Effects pedals come with extra features and advanced configuration options that give you greater control over your tone and workflow. Some pedals include switchable true or buffered bypass, others come with multiple preset navigation systems, and still others allow you to choose which functions are active upon start-up. If you want total control over your tone and effects units, you owe it to yourself to have a few Empress Effects pedals at your feet.
