GEAR SPOTLIGHT
WALRUS AUDIO
MONUMENT
REVIEW BY DAVID A. EVANS
STREET PRICE $249.00
Walrus Audio has set itself a
lofty goal: to reproduce, in
pedal form, the sublimity of
Monument Valley, located
along the border of Utah
and Arizona. This high-
desert landscape seems to
call for a powerful reverb or
delay effect to reproduce
echoes which would bounce
off the stony walls of the
valley’s sandstone buttes.
However, Walrus opted to
capture a different aspect
of the Valley with a tremolo
pedal. The rise and fall of
signal amplitude is meant to
reproduce the rise and fall
of the valley’s walls.
Although the Monument
acts as standard tremolo
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GEAR SPOTLIGHT //
pedal, but it also features
a special “harmonic”
mode for additional tonal
possibilities. In the standard
mode, selectable via a
small toggle switch, the
Monument delivers five
waveforms, ranging from
sine, square, triangle,
“lump” (which resembles
the upper half of a sine
wave), and randomized
square wave setting that
Walrus has cheekily called
“monument mode.”
The standard tremolo mode
provided anything from a
smooth sine wave to a fun,
keyboard-like triangle wave,
to randomized step-like
waves. I particularly liked
Waltus Audio Monument
the tone of the triangle
wave setting at a high
depth and moderate rate.
The tone reminded me
of an electric keyboard’s
roundness of tone. The
curious “lump” mode
produced what sounded
like a more restrained
version of the sine wave
tremolo. The lump mode
didn’t drop the signal level
as drastically as did the sine
setting. Even after adjusting
the depth and shape knobs
to compare the lump and
sine modes, the latter
tended to produce a more
noticeable and dramatic
swelling of the signal level.