Caroline

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.