Pedal

When designing the temperature controlled fuzz, we tried some unusual approaches. One false start utilized a voltage controlled error correction circuit to bias a single germanium transistor. It ultimately didn’t work for the fuzz, which is comically sensitive to transistor gain attributes. We did find a place for it though. It turns out it was PERFECT for achieving a germanium clean boost that, (like our fuzz) is impervious to component drift, leakage, and temperature....moreso in fact. We also fixed a couple other issues preventing the germanium transistor from being used as a convinc- ing linear boost...we increased the input headroom (even a normal guitar signal will drive a germanium transistor into unwanted input distortion without some tweaks) and increased the input impedance (a BJT transistor would normally thin out bass frequencies and interact negatively with whatever flows into it). The result is a germanium clean boost that can utilize a germanium transistor WITHOUT the weird artifacts that were previously accepted as part of the deal...temperature sensitivity, drift, and suboptimal input impedance and headroom. After the boost is first powered up, it takes about ten seconds before the error correction circuit correctly biases the germanium transistor After this things get interesting....we can hear how having the boost engaged makes guitar signals sound more musical...even when set at the same volume as the bypassed tone. Notes are given a simultaneously smoother and more detailed character, like a compressor but different. Some people we’ve shown it to have noted that it appears to deemphasize the unwanted parts of a signal and enhance the good. It’s killer on bass. It helps acoustic guitar pickups sound more natural. And of course it’ll push your amp into a frenzy. We hope you like it.

THE BASICS The Germanium Fuzz is a fuzz pedal. The knobs change the sounds. IMPORTANT: after plugging it into power (9vdc only), it will take 2-3 minutes on average to sound correct. Good time to tune your guitar and grab a beverage. The color of the LED indicator light might change. Don’t turn the internal trimmer. THAT’S IT. Read on only if you want some excellent primary source material for an online fuzz thesis… This pedal is designed around two germanium 2N527 OR 2N404 Germanium Transistors. They have been graded for gain and leakage and carefully matched to sound their best. They are set up in the ubiquitous 60’s circular fuzz topology, and tuned for good sound, and include some additional oddities aimed at solving the issues that prevent more widespread use of Germanium devices....detailed below. THE FIRST FUZZ PEDAL WITH AUTOMATIC THERMAL BIAS TECHNOLOGY The bias of the transistors in this pedal is automatically regulated by a circuit that GENTLY warms the transistors to a preset operating point using analog components, and ensures a consistent sound, no matter the external temperature. When the LED is orange, the transistors are warming up to increase their hFE (transistor gain) and to shift the bias point to the correct voltage. When the LED turns green, the warmer is off because the correct bias and hFE have been set. Expect the LED to toggle back and forth every so often while the pedal is on…that is how you know its working. The heaters will warm the transistors enough to still be effective on a sunny stage, but far cooler than anything that would harm the transistors. This pedal is designed to operate between freezing and 100˚F but might still sound fine outside this range. There are two colors: Studio Black is not meant for direct sunlight, Solar White is fine with it. We have found there is a 20˚F difference between a black pedal and a white pedal in direct sunlight. INPUT IMPEDANCE The low input impedance of the classic two transistor germanium fuzz circuit is both a blessing and a curse….a blessing because it can yield a tight sparkly clean tone when guitar volume is rolled down, and a curse because it sounds nasty (in a bad way) if there are buffers or pedals before it in a signal chain. We went to some extremes to keep the blessing and lose the curse. We installed a class A buffer in the very input of the Germanium Fuzz. This buffer feeds a passive pickup simulator circuit (an audio transformer set up as an inductor, a resistor, and a capacitor). These two additions make compatibility with other pedals possible without losing the desired sound. After the pickup simulator circuit, we have added an “Impedance” control, which simulates rolling down the guitar volume to get that tight sparkly sound…without adjusting your guitar volume….which you can still do and still sounds great. GAIN RANGE The circuit has been tuned to be used as a rich sounding clean boost, an overdrive, all the way up to an aggressive fuzz with some octave overtones. It will sound different, and I think more useful, than the classic versions. There are many colors of tone available with the impedance and gain controls…they are very interactive. This is meant as a “pretty” fuzz a la 60’s-70’s classic rock/psychedelic rock. It is not a spitty, harsh experimental fuzz and more often sounds like an overdrive or distortion until the gain is turned all the way up, and the impedance is turned down. INTERNAL TRIMMER Please don’t turn the internal trimmer. It is precisely set at our factory. Turning the trimmer voids the warranty. The correct trimmer position is marked in case you get one used where a tone lord hath already turnt it. POWER SUPPLY This pedal is for use only with a 9vdc Boss syle center negative power supply...There is no battery. Please do not subject this pedal to more than 9vdc or the pedal or power supply could be destroyed. This pedal draws less than 100ma when the heater is engaged, and far less than that when it is off. It will pull those 100ma instantaneously, which most power supplies have no issue with. With substandard or non standard power supplies it is possible the pedal will start oscillating madly at the heater threshhold, where the LED changes, in which case may we suggest using a current doubler cable, or switching to a higher rated power output. WARRANTY INFORMATION: 2 years excluding modification, trim pot manipulation, or damage.

Your quest for toanz have brought you to our HAWAIIAN PIZZA™: a bespoke artisanal blockchain of handcrafted tone, the sonic equivalent of a forbidden delicacy, all from just three knobs and the truth*. We discovered this circuit in the discarded manila file folders of our old multinational overlords, the Caroline Corporation, alongside all kinds of very 1970s corporate villainy and sci-fi plans for world domination. Your pedal was then dreamed, designed and created at our small batch distortery™ in Columbia, S.C. So thank you for supporting our work! *it’s really a fuzz, but a really versatile one

We’ve kept your original, dry signal path analog and pure, then given you a +21db boost/overdrive preamp to smash a low fidelity digital delay chip designed for karaoke machines and kids’ toys into smeared, repeated glory. Yeah, we’re going back in time – back to when they measured data in KILOBYTES! This pedal is VERY capable of fun runaway oscillations, both by turning up the summation knob or a controlled, high-pass filtered oscillation from the Havoc momentary footswitch. If you’ve ever struggled to make your delays come through prominently in the mix, or lost definition from your original signal, the attack and level controls can allow you to dial up everything from crisp, clean slapbacks to dirty, muted echoes and loud, powerful repeats. A beautiful, subtle modulation circuit courtesy of our friend Jack DeVille also sweetens the repeats with just the right amount of movement.

Imagine taking the ice bucket challenge, but you’re dunking yourself in dreams! Inspired by the ultra-modern line 14 of the Paris Métro and its sleek platforms of glass, steel and tile that add all kinds of cool sonic artifacts to the space, the MÉTÉORE™ (pronounced may-tay-or) is our take on reverb. We’ve kept your original signal path analog and pure, while giving you overdrive and regeneration controls to take you from spring reverb sounds to something much bigger. The controls are very interactive with each other, and as per Caroline tradition, this pedal can get VERY loud. You know, something something power, responsibility, blah blah blah…

PARABOLA™ is the sonic equivalent of riding your space mammoth through giant puddles in the astral plane while feeding it caffeinated energy drinks. Think of this as your rig’s new “tremolo channel”. We’ve adapted the deliciously sloshy, transistor-based LFO and distinctive waveform from our favorite “West German” device, modified its speed and depth to match and go beyond those from your favorite classic amps, and then added pre and post effect gain stages for both overdrive and volume boost. Then we offer the classic, dramatic amplitude modulation (AM) you might expect, or a filtered modulation (FM) that is subtle, beautiful, and less invasive on your playing. Your pedal was dreamed, designed, and created at our small batch distortery™ in Columbia, S.C. Thank you for supporting our work and putting it to use.

Tired of your fuzz getting lost in the mix? Wish you could just pour molten sonic gravy from your speakers? Imagine classic Muff-style fuzziness with the punch of a classic overdrive, and you have Shigeharu™. Using a cascading hybrid of the op-amp and BC184 transistor gain stages, Shigeharu provides all the sweet singing sustain and massive flamethrower gain you crave, but with unprecedented clarity, improved punch and definition, and consistent performance wherever it sits in your signal chain – even after buffers or wireless units. Combine that with the parallel octave-up voiced fuzz available on-demand with the Havoc* stomp and you have a whole lot of nasty right here. Two extra controls reside inside the pedal – a bias/gate control for dialing up broken, spitty sounds, and a slide switch that locks the octave-up “on” and converts the momentary to a kill/mute switch. Shigeharu™ was designed in collaboration with our friend John Snyder at Electronic Audio Experiments, because this thing was fearsome enough to compel us to seek a second opinion.

From seasick wobbles to glitchy bleep-bloops and “I think I can” huffs and puffs, the crazy-sounding stuff was actually the easy part for us. So once you’re done maxing out different settings to hear what kinds of bizarre wowie-zowie sounds you can make with this thing, we encourage you to explore the subtleties of how each control interacts with the others, and the remarkable range of sounds that you can quickly and intuitively dial in. Gentle, lagging vibrato, 1980s style choruses, and even some doubling effects are possible…and then, turn up & go wild again. SOMERSAULT™ applies a similar framework as our popular KILOBYTE™ and MÉTÉORE™ pedals. While the digital chip sets the delayed wet signal, the initial gain stage, dry signal, LFO, control set and output mixing stage are entirely analog. The end result sounds rich and fat, with the same robust feel and power our customers have come to expect from our work.

So, what IS the story on Wave Cannon® version 2.0, or as we’ve decided to call it, the Wave Cannon MKII Superdistorter? The long story short is that this thing is an unrepentant, unapologetic distortion pedal that is totally nasty and fun. This Cannon comes pre-loaded with balls (pun alert!) and is capable of going from cranked, lightly dirty amp tones to the sound of a furry Godzilla devouring a junkyard full of broken a/c window units. It’s different than the original, which was based on the classic ’70s fuzzstortions we grew up playing. It’s different from our Haymaker™, which is a wide range drive pedal based around the rotation of a clipping network into different locations in the circuit, and which is intended to respond and feel like an extension of your amp. This pedal is really about rocking your socks off. While it can do some extremely cool mild-to-medium crunch tones, Wave Cannon II is really capable of overwhelming your amp. The focus (mids) and tone controls are different from what we’ve done before and can give you a really broad range of textures and voicings. There is a LOT of gain and volume on tap, as we’d been infuriated in the past by great sounding classic distortion pedals we’ve owned that didn’t go far enough with clean amps, or were quieter than unity gain or the bypass signal. The rumble switch allows more low end if you want it, or lets you tighten things up if you don’t need it.

 Oil can delay units were manufactured by a company named Tel-Ray who later became better known as Morley. Tel-Ray mostly focused on being the OEM utilizing their oil can technology (Patent US3530227 A), branding units for Gibson (GA-RE4), Fender (Dimension IV), Acoustic, etc. They employed an electro-static storage method where the signal is “recorded” to a spinning disk, a layer of oil (for years rumored to be a mysterious carcinogenic oil) prevented this signal from leaking into the air before a “pickup” moments later played back the signal recorded to the disk. Compared to the counterparts of the day (tape, drum, wire delay machines), their sound was more low fidelity, murky, often with a more consistent musical vibrato that correlated to the spinning disk speed. We like to describe the sound as mysterious. The Catalinbread ADINEKO pedal is an echo, reverb, vibrato pedal that faithfully models the sonic experience of these oil can units.

 The Catalinbread Belle Epoch Tape Echo, has tape echo sounds so authentic you’d swear there was tape inside the pedal! Inspired by the Maestro Echoplex, EP-3 model, perhaps the most famous tape delay ever, the Belle Epoch features everything we love about the EP-3 in a small, maintenance free pedal format. We felt that a “tape echo” pedal was much more than just a standard digital delay with some “filtering” on the repeats. There are a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle traits of the Echoplex that needed to be implemented in order to be authentic. The preamp, the self-oscillation character, the ability to control the “record level” of the signal hitting “tape”, the wow and flutter, the way the repeats decay, the way the circuit interfaces with the amp and other pedals – all these things were important to get right. The original unit was used as a musical instrument unto itself and this is what we captured with the Belle Epoch.

Exact EP-3 circuitry, from the 22 volt power rail, to the JFET preamp (later spec), to the mixer stage, to the high gain silicon transistor based record and playback amplifiers, to the feedback loop. All circuitry is faithfully reproduced and fine-tuned from the original EP-3 specifications. The only thing missing are the record and playback heads, with a 24-bit high-fidelity digital delay line taking the place of the tape.All-discrete, through-hole construction with orange drop 225P capacitors, carbon composition resistors, germanium diodes, and other premium parts.

Marshall amps helped supercharge the performance, and shape the sound of rock and roll. When the house lights dimmed, all you could see through the hazy darkness was the array of red pilot lights shining from a backline wall of Marshall stacks. In the absence of your own personal wall of Marshalls and the necessary road crew required to lug them around, the Dirty Little Secret (DLS) is the perfect secret weapon in your tone arsenal. This is your “always on” pedal, designed to be the “foundation” of your pedalboard, transforming any amplifier into those raging British stacks. It forms the core of your guitar sound which you can enhance and embellish by adding boosters, fuzzes, filters, and other overdrives in front of it.

What began as an exploration of a specific '60s and '70s classic rock tone, evolved into a multidimensional gain machine capable of anything between unruly sputtery fuzz and classic rock chime. This is not meant to make you sound like a classic rock god, it is meant to inspire you from using some of the same tools they used that would otherwise be inaccessible in pedal form. The heart and soul of the Dreamcoat is a near-exact recreation of the preamp circuit from the Aiwa TP-1011 reel-to-reel deck that can be found in '60s and '70s classic rock recordings. All of the functionality of that unit is present, from sparkling cleans to powerful crunch and glassy leads, but the “Sat” control gives you an extra layer of grunt, allowing the Dreamcoat to range between near-dry tonal indifference to complete “melting-amp” Neil Young-esque tweed sounds. A certain classic rock sound wasn’t just a tape deck, though. Some players installed a passive inductor-based frequency “booster” into their guitars that cut both sides of the spectrum around the resonant frequency of their guitar, giving the appearance of frequency boost. To that end, we’ve added a frequency booster circuit that doesn’t cut anything, giving you a richer tone with a little oomph where it counts. To top it all off, we’ve included a clean blend circuit that begins after the frequency boost and ends after the tape preamp, so you can EQ the sum of your clean tone and dirt, all while preserving your pick attack and presence. The whole shebang runs at 20V, just a hair higher than the original Aiwa, expanding its capabilities and delivering tons of headroom.

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!