Sonicake’s Warped Dimension Promises 4 Classic Mods For $50, But Is Worth It?

We dive back into the affordable end of the pedal world to see if this Sonicake pedal is a market disruptor.

After a slew of new independent and boutique builder reviews, we’re dipping our toes back into the affordable gear section. Today we’ll be taking a look at Sonicake, a popular brand from the affordable overseas market. I often consider this one of a handful of “Amazon” brands, because you often only see them available there.

Sonicake’s Warped Dimension is a larger enclosure, with dual footswitches (one is tap tempo) that is part of the brand’s more premium offerings. This is a trend we’ve seen in recent years, where budget brands like Caline, Sonicake, and Nux have sought to put out higher end pedals in better enclosures and with more features.

The Warped Dimension pairs tap tempo with four control knobs (rate, depth, level, and tone) for all the classic modulation types. There’s chorus, flanger, tremolo, and phaser on board this pedal, all for about $55 USD.

Demo Time

My Thoughts

Sonicake’s Warped Dimension is overwhelmingly “meh”. Now that may seem like a lazy piece of writing, but the pedal does a little bit of everything with a few good sounds here and there. But none of them stuck out to me as particularly great modulated tones. The pedal really suffers from missing a “mix” knob, at first I thought that’s what level would do, blending clean and modulated signal together. But it’s just an overall volume knob, which is really quite useless in this context.

What makes it so useless is that the flanger and tremolo effects really are sensitive to volume. Tremolo can be as subtle or as hard as you want if you can mix in the level of the trem effect, not just the level of the guitar signal leaving the pedal. Instead, you’re left with a bunch of modulated tones that are often over the top here. Especially with the flanger mode, which is artificially smooth and choppy, more like a tremolo than the whooshing jet sounds or warm chorus of other flangers. Likewise, the tremolo effect never felt all that present unless you really cranked it up. It was hard to hear it, literally, unless rate or depth were pressed up. Overall, there’s a lack of flexibility in these controls.

The phaser mode had the opposite trend of the flanger, as at some times it barely felt like it was a phaser at all. Now it did create some cool harmonic richness, but you really have to crank the rate and depth to get it to phase. Now, the tone knob is especially useless if there’s no mix knob, as it doesn’t really help to make it brighter or darker if you don’t like the mod sound to begin with.

Overall this is a great pedal if you’re just looking for very basic, entry level modulation. And if you don’t rely on much more than chorus, this is a great option. Overall the chorus sounds were a real highlight and very solid across the board. But if you’re like me and really use a lot of flanger/phaser, you’re $55 is better spent on a used MXR Phase 90. This is a generalist pedal that has some cool features (tap tempo) and versatility to cover very broad non-specific sounds. I think there’s plenty of people who could find use for this pedal, but I’m not one of them. If you want real budget modulation an don’t mind some limited tone shaping, this pedal is worth your attention. However, if you want real rich modulation with variable forms, look elsewhere.