Vongon Paragraphs II Review
A filter pedal you actually need!
Vongon is one of my favorite companies right now. I love it when companies just make a few products and focus on making them amazing instead of making lots of differents ones without paying attention to all the details. And Vongon is certainly a company that makes incredible products. So when they contacted me about a new pedal release, I was very excited to test it out and do a review about it!
If you don’t know a lot about Vongon, it’s a company that makes the Ultrasheer which is a reverb and modulation pedal, the Polyphrase which is stereo echo inspired by the Lexicon Prime Time rack delay, and only a few months ago they took a wild turn and decided to release a synthesizer, the Replay! But their very first release a few years ago was a pedal called Paragraphs. And now, they have decided to release Paragraphs II which is a huge improvement compared to the original one. My friends at Vongon took all the knowledge they acquired by making their Replay synthesizer and used it to redesign Paragraphs from the ground up!
Overview
Paragraphs II is a stereo four-pole resonant low-pass ladder-style filter and it’s essentially the same filter that you can find inside the Replay synth. It’s also redesigned and now looks like the other two Vongon pedals which in my opinion are the most beautiful-looking pedals ever made. The build quality of all Vongon pedals is amazing, the wooden enclosure looks stunning, and all the knobs, buttons, and connections feel and look very premium!
In terms of controls, you will, of course, find a big Frequency knob to control the filter’s cutoff, a Resonance knob that will start self-oscillating at around 1 o’clock, and a Mix knob that allows you to have both the dry and the filtered signals coming through at any ratio. The ladder filter in Paragraphs II is very smooth but once you start adding resonance it can get quite aggressive! Nothing too exciting so far besides a very solid filter.
The magic of Paragraphs II lies in its modulation options which are plenty! First, you have a bipolar envelope generator to “open or close” the filter. To control it, you can use the Rise and Fall sliders which are essentially an Attack & Release that you’ve probably seen on many synthesizers. The Envelope also has three distinct modes. Follower where the envelope follows your signal’s amplitude and reacts to it, Trigger where it gets triggered once your signal passes the sensitivity level (which you set with the small knob “sens“), and Cycle where the envelope turns into a looping envelope. Paragraphs II is a very responsive pedal due to its envelope. It uses your signal’s dynamics to control the filter and that can add so much movement and expressiveness to your playing!
On top of that, there is an LFO that can be a sinewave or a random-style modulation source. To control it, you have the LFO Rate & Depth knobs. Keep in mind that the LFO can go from very slow to very fast so you can use it mildly or to its extreme. When you increase the Rate to close to 100hz you’ll start having some sort of ring modulation effects that can sound very interesting in the right context!
As far as connections go, Paragraphs II has two full-sized inputs and two outputs plus a MIDI & CV input. With MIDI, you can control the pedal’s parameters but also gives you the ability to store and recall presets! CV allows you to modulate the filter’s cutoff with an external source like for example an LFO module which is awesome for us modular nerds!
When it comes to stereo, Vongon took full advantage of this pedal’s stereo inputs & outputs. The Envelope processes separately the right & left inputs and creates a complex stereo field and the LFO goes from right to left like a ping-pong delay widening your sounds by a ton!
If you want to listen to Paragraphs II with a variety of sounds, I have a full demo video on YouTube!
How do I use it?
Filter pedals are not a necessity for most pedalboards although they can do a lot of useful things. The most common usage of filter pedals is to create the “Wah” effect that we all know but I’m not such a big fan of. Having a lot of synths, a modular synth, and also playing the guitar, I’ve found a lot of instances where a pedal like Paragraphs II was great to have.
The obvious reason would be to just filter out some high frequencies but that’s something you can easily do in post with a filter or EQ. One of my favorite ways to use this pedal was to create swells by using a guitar. You can have a slow attack (using the Rise slider), set your envelope to Follower mode, and play. Your guitar will now slowly swell as the filter opens which is an ambient sound I love.
Another very useful use case of Paragraphs II is to “add“ a filter to a synthesizer that does not have a filter (or use it as a second filter). Looking at my studio, I have a lot of synths that don’t have filters onboard so running them through Paragraphs II gave me the option of a lowpass filter. Plus you can modulate it, adding another dimension to your plain synth sounds!
With synthesizers, the Filter is one of the core building blocks when it comes to sound design so having a pedal like this gives you an extra tool to carve your sound, give it movement, make it stereo, and much more!
Pros & Cons
Paragraphs II is a great creative tool for your desk or pedalboard. The Envelope on Paragraphs is so good due to its rise & fall controls that go from 5 milliseconds to 4 seconds. That means you can get very percussive and snappy using a fast attack or create swells by increasing the rise slider.
The fact that it’s stereo is not only convenient when you use stereo instruments like a synthesizer but it also uses its stereo nature to the maximum. Any mono or stereo sound can be spread to the stereo field just by adding the LFO - so no more boring mono modulation! As I said before, the build quality is incredible and it feels like a premium boutique pedal with an added bonus of looking so beautiful.
Lastly, the way I work within Ableton Live is to always have a filter on the Mix bus so I can then automate or play live with it to add movement to my mix. Having a hardware solution for that without the need for Midi mapping is awesome!
The thing I feel was a missed opportunity with Paragraphs II was to have a multi-mode filter that could also be a bandpass and a highpass. This way it would be much more versatile than it is now. It’s also based on my personal taste because I really like bandpass filters but yeah, for most scenarios a lowpass filter is what you need.
And another thing I would add would be to have a sync input so you can clock the LFO and the Cycling Envelope. Since you can create some very rhythmic effects using those two, it would be nice to be able to stay in tempo with your song.
Conclusion
The Vongon Paragraphs II is staying on my desk. I’m a synth guy so I love filters. In my Eurorack case, I think I have more than 5 filter modules!
So having one as a pedal is so great. Paragraphs II has a balance I love in any type of gear. It can do a basic job perfectly and fast – talking about some basic filtering of sounds and at the same time has all you need when you wanna go wild and creative. You just turn a few knobs, and you start exploring!
I never thought I actually needed a filter pedal but now my mind has changed! No one can have enough filters so I’m glad I now have an extra one with Paragraphs II!
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