Empress Effects ParaEq MkII Parametric Equalizer

The ParaEq MKII and ParaEq Deluxe bring back one of Empress’ most beloved pedal designs with exciting new features. The original ParaEq, released in 2010, steadily grew in reputation for its visceral tone-shaping, extreme transparency, and intuitive controls, rivalled only by studio-grade equipment. After being discontinued in 2020, we’ve watched used ParaEq prices on sites like reverb.com skyrocket, and it solidified our belief of the importance of highly controllable EQ adjustments with studio quality sound. With the reintroduction of the ParaEq, we’ve kept everything people loved about the original, but we took it to the next level. We’ve enhanced the already amazing audio path purity with lower noise circuitry and a huge 27V of headroom. We’ve also managed to squeeze it all into a pedalboard friendly footprint with top-mounted jacks for maximum convenience.

3 bands of parametric EQ, each with 3 selectable Q widths, give you an extremely flexible EQ. The wide Q is great for general tone shaping and is extremely transparent. The medium Q is perfect for everyday problem solving like pulling out boxiness from the low mids or reducing harshness and adding a bit in the upper mids. The narrow Q excels at notching out problem frequencies and is a saviour for acoustic guitarists when combating feedback issues.

The Boost section offers +30dB of clean boost and can be set to engage with the EQ section to act as a make-up gain when doing subtractive EQ, or can be used completely separately as a pure clean boost. Great for bumping up your volume for solos, or hitting the front end of a tube amp for a bit more break-up.

The signal path of the ParaEq MKII and ParaEq Deluxe consists of the highest quality components chosen to deliver a perfectly organic tone. The transparent and sweet sounding EQ enhances your sound without masking the pure tone of your instrument, whether it be guitar, bass, synthesizer, or the human voice. We’ve increased the headroom significantly up to 27V internally, meaning it’ll be a real challenge to make this thing clip. Did we mention it’s noise free? We measured the distortion to be less than 0.05%, resulting in a pristine sound. True bypass means you’ll never worry if your tone has been sucked dry. Advanced configurations allow for buffered bypass, independence between EQ and boost controls, and startup state configurability. Top-mounted jacks mean the pedal can be patched up into your pedalboard as cleanly as it sounds and occupy a fraction of the space compared to our old enclosures.