When the original Gamechanger Audio PLUS Pedal turned up at NAMM 2017, it stole the show by ignoring the rulebook: a heavy brass foot lever bolted to a stompbox, built to look and feel exactly like the sustain pedal on an acoustic piano. Nine years later the Latvian company has rebuilt that idea from the circuit up. The Gamechanger PLUS Pedal II lands at $399, ships in August 2026, and swaps the original’s clever loop trick for something the company calls Spectral Sampling. If you have ever wanted a note or a chord to simply hang in the air while you keep playing over the top, this is the most serious tool yet built for that job.
What the brass pedal actually does
The concept has not changed, and that is the point. Press the brass lever and the pedal captures whatever you are holding, then sustains it indefinitely so your hands are free to move on. Lift the lever and the held sound fades. It is the exact behavior of a piano’s damper pedal, transplanted onto guitar, bass, or anything with a pickup or a microphone.
The original did this by sampling your signal and building a seamless loop out of the note’s decay. That worked, but loops have a texture to them; long tones could sound a little static or glassy once the algorithm found its splice point. The PLUS Pedal II throws that method out.
Spectral Sampling, and why it sounds different
Gamechanger’s new engine captures your input in real time, then resynthesizes it in the frequency domain instead of looping a chunk of audio. In practice that means the pedal is rebuilding the sound from its harmonic content, preserving the timbre, the dynamics, and the natural movement of the note rather than freezing a single slice and repeating it. Held chords bloom and breathe; they do not tick over like a stuck sample.
Layering is where it gets interesting for players. A dedicated LAYERS knob stacks anywhere from one clean sustained voice up to ten simultaneous harmonic layers. Turn it past ten and you reach Infinite Mode, where older layers fold continuously into newer ones so you can keep adding notes forever without the wall of sound ever cutting off. Park your foot on the brass pedal and Auto Layer Catch grabs each new note you play, exactly like holding the damper down on a piano and running up a scale. Two more controls, RISE and DECAY, shape how each individual layer fades in and out, while TONE and RESONANCE apply evolving filtering and harmonic emphasis to the sustained signal. A circular halo of LEDs around the pedal shows the volume of the active layers in real time, which matters more than it sounds when you are managing a stack live.
The addition that changes who this pedal is for
The original PLUS was a guitarist’s and keyboardist’s curiosity. The II quietly widens the audience with one hardware decision: a combo XLR and quarter-inch input with a built-in studio-grade microphone preamp. A saxophone, an upright bass, a violin, or a vocalist can plug straight in with no interface or external preamp in the chain. Gamechanger built its launch demo around bassist Stanislavs Judins playing jazz on an amplified double bass, which tells you where the company thinks the growth is.
For electric players there are two more practical wins. A Kill-Dry switch removes your direct signal so the pedal outputs only the sustained layers, which is what you want in a stereo ambient rig or a parallel effects loop. And a switchable analog FX loop lets you place an external pedal PRE, POST, or, most usefully, INSIDE the sustain engine, so you can feed reverb or delay into the layers themselves rather than smearing it across your dry playing. If you already think carefully about pedal signal chain order, that third option is the one worth experimenting with.
Where it fits, and where it does not
The marketing leans hard on cinematic pads and ambient soundscapes, so here is the contrarian read. Yes, the PLUS Pedal II is a dream for ambient and post-rock builders, and it will do things a reverb pedal or a simple freeze function cannot, because the sustained layer tracks the real harmonic content of what you played rather than a synthesized tail. But treating it as an ambient-only box undersells it.
Run a distorted rhythm through it and hold a power chord under a solo, and you have a one-guitar wall of sound with no second player and no backing track. Set it to a single clean layer with a fast decay and it behaves like a natural sustainer, closer to an EBow you can switch on and off with your foot. Bass players can hold a root note through a chord change, which is genuinely hard to fake any other way. It is less a genre effect than a compositional tool, and that is the honest reason it costs $399 rather than $149.
The optional dedicated footswitch, $79 on its own or bundled with the pedal for $478, unlocks three performance modes: Wet Only, a Latch that keeps the engine always on, and Hide, which conceals your dry signal the moment you press the brass pedal so the audience hears only the generated layers. If you plan to use this live rather than in a studio, budget for the footswitch. The brass lever alone handles capture, but the footswitch is what makes the modes playable mid-song.
The verdict at $399
Gamechanger has spent nine years building a reputation on gear that does not sound like anything else, from the high-voltage Plasma fuzz to the modular Motor Synth. The PLUS Pedal II is the company circling back to the product that started it and rebuilding it with a decade of engineering behind it. The Spectral Sampling engine is a real upgrade over the loop-based original, the mic preamp opens the door to instruments no guitar pedal usually serves, and the internal FX loop is the kind of detail that only shows up when the people designing a pedal actually play through it.
It is not a first-pedalboard purchase, and it will not replace your delay or your reverb. But for a player who wants notes and chords to persist while their hands keep working, nothing on the market does it with this much control. First units ship in August. If you fell for the original at a NAMM booth and walked away because loops were not quite musical enough, this is the version worth trying.
Sources: Gamechanger Audio, No Treble, Sound On Sound, Sonicstate, and Gamechanger Audio’s company history.