We try out a lot of different circuits at Catalinbread when looking for new ideas, always looking for that spark of something special. During one such prototyping session, one circuit really stood out. We’re talking about a rare and obscure circuit known as the Harmonic Percolator. “Wow! There’s something to be mined here!” This circuit has the amazing property of generating predominantly even-order harmonics – which creates an amazingly sweet and clear distortion. 

You may know of this circuit from its use by Steve Albini, who owns one particular unit that apparently has magical properties no other unit seems to have. We could search for holy grails and chase rainbows, but we saw a potential beyond one person’s use of it. Oddly enough, the ‘Percolator has a reputation for creating an ugly sound, albeit a cool and ugly sound. But we found something beautiful in it. So beautiful that you could play complex jazz chords through it and every note rings sweet and clear. So, using the original circuit as the springboard, we created the Karma Suture.

Demo by session

Demo by Overdrive Family

Review by The Gear Page

Review by Musiker-Board

Manual

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Karma Suture Germanium

The Bicycle Delay was something like an “Albert Hoffman -the inventor of LSD, which we all love- moment” (to quote a good friend and guitarist Neal Casal). I sat down with no plan of where I was going but to allow myself the freedom to be open to wherever the journey took me and just document the experience. Really a strange path to travel when it involves something as cerebral as programming software. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe that’s a pure form of creativity, to use the boundaries something so matter of fact as programming as a medium for art? The result was a pedal as autobiographical as any I have been involved in. The Bicycle Delay is a physical manifestation of the experience of consciousness, letting go of the desire to control everything, and maintaining a positive attitude to leave room for a positive experience.

Demo by Guitar Chimp

Official Product Video

Review by Pedal of the Day

Review by reddit /guitarpedals

Bicycle Delay

Fewer things give guitarists that fabled “riff face” more than a fuzz mixed with an analog octave down, and our original Perseus was a trailblazer in that regard. With that said, the Perseus Dio is a rightful successor to that box. The Perseus Dio greatly expands on the concept of our original device, giving you a three-voice all-analog octave down device with adjustable octave filters. Three knobs control the mixer section, giving you one octave down, two octaves down, and a dry, boosted distortion. The Dry knob gives you a really great light distortion sound that’s more than capable of pushing your amp into overdrive, but the fun starts when you control the levels of octave down signals with their accompanying low-pass filters. With no filtering, the octaves are harmonically rich square waves that sound like old-school Nintendo, but turning up their accompanying filter knobs smooth out the harmonics and turn into clean octaves down. Let’s get pixelated. 

Demo by Demos In The Dark

Demo by Mike Hermans

Review by Guitar World

Perseus DIO

Es war der Oktober im Jahr 1971, als die Mannen von Pink Floyd ihr berühmtes Werk „Live at the Pompeii“ im Amphitheater der gleichnamigen italienischen Stadt aufnahmen. Stets mit dabei war eines der wohl angesagtesten Effektgeräte der damaligen Zeit – das Binson Echorec. Wohl kaum ein anderes Gerät prägte so maßgeblich den Sound von Pink Floyd der frühen Jahre wie dieses Echogerät, dessen Prinzip auf einer rotierenden Magnetscheibe basierte, die mit vier Tonköpfen das Signal aufnahm bzw. abspielte. Dabei machte nicht nur Leadgitarrist Dave Gilmour vom Echorec gebrauch, auch Bassist Roger Waters und Tastenmann Richard Wright nutzen diese Maschine ausgiebig.

The Binson Echorec was so cool we had no choice but to bring it back. And we wanted to bring it back right. We wanted to take all the goodness of that huge Binson Echorec and squeeze it down into a standard sized stompbox without losing anything. In fact, in addition to not losing any of the qualities that made it such a compelling musical device, we wanted to EXTEND its capabilities because the original Binson hinted at possibilities that it couldn’t realize. We’re talking about variable delay time! We thought, “What if we had the same four playback head concept but could stretch the delay time out beyond the 300mS of the original Binson?” Then the rhythmic patterns suggested by the various combinations of those four playback heads could really come to life!

Review by Amazona 

Demo by The Pedal Zone 

Demo by Catalinbread Effects

ECHOREC

"Tremolo" is only scratching the surface. With 8 unique programs, the Tremolo8 shows you what volume modulation is truly capable of.

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