9 of the Best Catalinbread Pedals

This is a actually quite a simple pedal superficially, but the magic is in the interaction of its 3 dials - and those in-betweeny-places! What you have in effect here is a Sustainer, Wah, Filter, Pitch Shifter and Harmonizer all in one. The 3 knobs - Position (Dry/Wet Mix), Velocity (Pitch - 0 Hz / Octave Down / None), Acceleration (2-Pole Low Pass Filter). And inportantly you have a 2-way toggle switch which allows you to control either Velocity or Acceleration with and Expression pedal. Finally the Hold footswich stops, holds and loops the current sample giving you typically stutter sorts of textures. To be fully enjoyed, this pedal requires a lot of foot interaction and most definitely an Expression pedal in tandem - which some will like and others not. The cleverness here really is the variety of effects you can get out of so few controls really - I can see the appeal for sure, but this is not really the kind of pedal I personally naturally gravitate towards.

I've mentioned several times that the MKIII DLS has long been Andy Martin's personal favourite Marshall Style (Plexi) pedal - yes Andy of Pro Guitar Shop, Tone Report and now Reverb.com fame. This pedal has been on my wishlist for the longest time - but each time I went for a preferred alternative - most recently the Menatone The King and REVV's new G2 Overdrive. Yet Catalinbread finally managed to reel me in with proper re-worked and refined version of the pedal. There was a Purple Levant edition back in 2015 - but that was purely a colourway option. The Red Mod has significantly re-tuned dial ranges for more punch, more gain and just more tweakability overall. This pedal has only just recently arrived, so I've not fully formulated whether I prefer it to current incumbent on that slot - the Menatone King. And then I need to go through the whole exercise again when the G2 arrives - the Red Mod DLS will get a decent innings though and I will put it through its paces. The one thing they should really have done here though is externalised the still internal Super Lead / Super Bass voicing switch - surely they've been watching what Xotic Efects and Vemuram are doing amongst others - having a key voicing switch inside the pedal makes no sense nowadays - it really should be externalised in one way or another!

While the Belle Epoch Deluxe is obviously the most accomplished of Catalinbread's delays, I would hazard a guess that this is its most popular pedal. I have seen this on so many different pedalboards - again Mick Taylor uses it quite a lot, and we witnessed it recently on the Chris Buck That Pedal Show episode - this delay is just in very wide pedalboard distribution and understandably so. This is one of the most perfect miniaturisations of the original Binson Echorec unit - the 4 parameter dials Swell, Tone, Delay Time and Mix give you near enough everything you need - and when combined with the 12-position Program Selector you get an excellent facsimile of the Echorec in a very compact pedal enclosure. Many prefer the added tweakability the Dawner Prince Boonar provides - but if you want to keep things simple and effective this is the one for you. It sounds incredible really, and actually works really well as an always-on delay. Even though a mono delay - his one has still appeared on my wishlist on and off. Since I now have the Strymon Volante, it's appeal is somewhat diminished, but for its size it sure packs a punch.

Catalinbread's pretty faitful Silicon replica of the original late 60's splatty and unrefined Mosrite Fuzzrite Fuzz - which never gained quite the following of its other 60's peers - the Fuzz Face and Tone Bender. The Fuzzrite is less flexible and less articulate in most ways - does not have that guitar-volume-knob clean-up etc. It's a little rawer and more ragged, and became popular with garage punks and noiseniks! This is however still a fabulous fuzz voice if you know how to best use it - and is probably closer to the original Maestro fuzz overall in its somewhat unrefined nature. That said Catalinbread have done a lot of work with the Volume and Depth controls - to give you far more variety than was possible with those original units. This still though happens to be a somewhat acquired taste for most fuzz players, and is unlikely to ever reach the same degree of popularity as say the Fuzz Face, Tone Bender or Big Muff.

I actually really like pretty much all of Catalinbread's fuzzes, and have seen fit to add 3 to my collection already - including this rather interesting hybrid of Tone Bender and Rat. I really see this as more of a rat style pedal than a Tone Bender even though it includes characteristics of both. I don't always include it in my Rat overviews as it is strictly speaking a hybrid even though its core sound is mostly Rat Distortion! You get 4 controls - Input (Input Sensitivity), Gain, Filter and Volume - three of those obviously directly derived from the Rat topology; while the Input dial kind of tames or pushes the distortion character over the top. I tend to like this pedal best at relatively cranked values - preferring to use my VFE Alpha Dog for subtler flavours of Rat - even though this one is capable of that too. As a fan of the Rat format - I think I have 12 now of that type - I really like the slightly different character this one brings, and it still gets in on the rotation fairly regularly.

The RAH or Royal Albert Hall pedal was designed to sound like Jimmy Page's Treble-Boosted HiWatt from a seminal 1970 Led Zeppelin gig at that famous venue. Catalinbread in fact had another HiWatt style pedal out prior to this - the 4-knob WIIO (The Who) pedal with separate Treble and Bass controls; the newer RAH combines the WIIO with the 3-Band EQ from the Dirty Little Secret to produced a slightly more refined and tweakable HiWatt style pedal - which though does not quite match the slightly more rawness and gain of the original WIIO circuit. For me the mid-frequencies are key, and while I've considered hunting down the WIIO, the RAH is the one that's on my wishlist - I've been wanting one of these for a while - it just hasn't happened yet!

This is another Catalinbread pedal that I've had on my wishlist for a while - although there still seem to be some differing opinions on its prowess - I still really rather quite like it. It's a take on that essential Tony Iommi Black Sabbath Treble-Boosted Laney Supergroup Amp sound - a slightly fuzzy drive / distortion. To my ears it sounds about right, which the Galileo also did from my research, but in playback I found that could have done with both more range on output volume and gain - so I can't say for sure about this one. Tone-wise it sounds about right, but we must also contend with playback and feel - and how this pedal ongoing responds and fits into setups. I still want this one, it still remains on the wishlist, but it hasn't been so much a priority of late. There are plenty of clones of this pedal about though which seems to attest to its still significant popularity! The Sabbra has 4 controls - Presence (Post Gain EQ), Gain, Volume and Range (Treble Booster) which give you surprisingly varied tone-shaping abilities - the key one here is probably range though - which generates those fuzzy overtones!

I had not been particularly aware of this pedal until Catalinbread recently re-introduced a limited pink colourway edition of this. I generally quite like pink pedals, but for the Teaser Stallion much prefer the black, yellow and orange main version that preceded it. The very original versions were landscape medium silver boxes, then regular compact enclosure in silver or yellow, then the black, yellow and orange as pictured, and finally the pink limited edition. For those who are familiar with the Antichthon - this is along similar lines, but being a Distortion rather than Fuzz - and not quite as weird reacting, but close. You have 4 dials at your disposal here - Feedback, Timbre (Character), Volume and Distortion, as well as the 2-way Oscillation switch - for which weird things happen when you engage it. Like the Antichthon it is very sensitive to the Volume and Tone dials on your guitar, and although not quite as temperamental, it produces still some interesting flourishes - including a Pink Floyd style 'Seagull' sound! It can just be a fairly normal distortion if you need it to be, but it has several more interesting characteristics besides - definitely a rather unusual pedal, and why it is included here.

There are two in this list I already have - the Antichthon Oscillating Fuzz and the Galileo Boosted Vox style drive - both excellent pedals in their own right, but not quite up to the level of the Top 9. I chose the Teaser Stallion over the Antichthon, and while I had the Galileo in my pedal-chain for quite a while I always felt it could do with a little more gain and more volume, which is what I get with my preferred Bearfoot FX Emerald Green Distortion Machine.

Besides those is the smaller compact version of the Belle Epoch - somewhat overshadowed by its more recent bigger Deluxe brother but still a great delay in its own right. More interesting for me is the quirkier Bicycle Delay - which even though a mono pedal, I would still use probably as a more textural element within my stereo pedal-chain - definitely something unique.

I also really quite like the Germanium Karma Suture Harmonic Percolator and the Ampeg-like SFT Drive - all great choices, and all on my wishlist.

• Antichthon Oscillating Fuzz
• Belle Epoch Compact Delay (Echoplex)
• Bicycle Delay (Travelling/Ascending/Descending Delay)
• Galileo Drive/Distortion (Treble-boosted Vox)
• Karma Suture Germanium Harmonic Percolator
• SFT Drive (Ampeg SVT)

It's interesting how many of these have been featured on this site - I've pretty much touched on each of these at one stage or another. There are still some unique gems here - like the Adineko Oil Can Delay, and I've seen Paul Gilbert favouring the Callisto Chorus. The Csidman Skipping/Glitch delay has feature a whole number of times in both delay and glitch categories - and so the list goes on. The two Formual drive pedals were also both in my recent Tweed Drive overview.

I really don't think there is a duff Catalinbread pedal in the range. There are some that don't particularly interest me, or where I have preferred alternatives from other suppliers. But generally all of these pedals are made with a lot of care and due attention. I've stated before that I don't particularly like the knobs on these pedals - while I think the graphics here are largely quite elegant and distinctive. You can always pick out a Catalinbread pedal easily on a pedalboard. Price-wise they're pretty reasonable too all-round, and don't suffer as much with Dollar to Pound parity as many of their USA Peers do.

• Adineko Oil Can Delay
• Callisto Chorus/Vibrato
• Csidman Skipping/Glitch Delay
• Epoch Pre PreAmp (Echoplex PreAmp)
• Formula 5F6 Drive (Tweed Drive)
• Formula No. 55 Drive (Tweed Drive)
• Karma Suture Silicon Harmonic Percolator
• Naga Viper Treble Booster
• NiCompressor
• Octapussy Octave Up Fuzz
• Perseus Sub-Octave Fuzz
• Talisman Plate Reverb
• Topanga Spring Reverb
• Valcoder Tremolo
• Zero Point Flanger