Bananana Effects Ships QUIMERA, a Polyphonic Synth and Sampler Pedal

Five years after starting development, the Japanese pedal maker Bananana Effects began shipping QUIMERA, a polyphonic synthesizer and sampler crammed into a 145 x 121 x 55 mm stompbox that tracks your instrument's signal in real time and re-synthesizes it on the fly. The pedal became available in March 2026 at $399 USD, with free worldwide shipping direct from Bananana Effects, excluding VAT and duties.

The core pitch-tracking system achieves polyphonic detection with latency around 5ms, a figure that would have been a serious engineering challenge a decade ago. No special pickups are required; the pedal reads a standard guitar signal and offers three tracking modes: fundamental with filtering harmonics, transpose, and quantize. Glide (portamento) and sensitivity are also adjustable, giving players meaningful expressive control over how the tracking responds.

On the synthesis side, QUIMERA runs two independent oscillators with morphing and hard sync, both routable through a built-in modulation engine. That engine includes two LFOs with seven waveforms each and MIDI sync support. LFO output can be sent to volume for tremolo, pitch for vibrato, or to hard sync and wavetable index for more complex motion. Three ADSRs handle envelope shaping. Elektronauts describes the synthesis character as sitting comfortably "at home in the subtractive world," which is accurate framing given the dual-oscillator, envelope-heavy architecture. The unit is not sequencing or FM territory; it's closer to a compact digital polysynth with an analog-style signal path in spirit.

The sampler side accepts mono 16-bit WAV files at 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz. Wavetable length runs either 128 or 256 samples using 64 consecutive frames. Bananana ships the pedal with 30 onboard waveforms, including some genuinely interesting choices: SUIKINKUTSU (the Japanese water instrument), TAPE CHOIR, DELAY OSC, CHORD Q, and RANDOM MALLET alongside more conventional entries like TAPE FLUTE and RES NOISE. User samples can be loaded and customized, and a stand-alone recording mode lets you capture audio directly from the input without a computer. A trim function lets you set playback range and adjust pitch after recording.

Under the hood, an ARM Cortex-M7 32-bit processor handles tracking, synthesis, and effects simultaneously. Power requirements are 9V DC center-negative with a 400 mA draw; Bananana recommends an adapter rated at 500 mA or higher. Input impedance is 1 MΩ, and the unit uses buffered bypass. At 490 g (17.3 oz), it sits in pedalboard territory without dominating the board.

The Elektronauts community greeted the announcement with immediate enthusiasm, with one user noting it as a potential alternative to the Empress Zoia Enzo X, and another expressing pleasant surprise that the entire project appears to be the work of a single developer. That solo-builder context also makes the TARARIRA, Bananana's large-format arpeggiator, worth keeping in mind as precedent: at least one Elektronauts user who owns a TARARIRA called it "pretty great," suggesting the company's build quality holds up in practice.

The full I/O specification, including MIDI port types and audio output configuration, was not detailed on the product page at time of writing. An online manual is listed on the Bananana Effects site for buyers who need the complete connectivity picture before committing.