Catalinbread Valcoder Mountain Edition Throwback Style Tremolo Guitar Effects Pedal

Catalinbread Valcoder Mountain Edition Throwback Style Tremolo Guitar Effects Pedal

The Valco company of Chicago made amplifiers under their own name in addition to building amps for other companies such as Supro, National, and Gretsch, to name a few. Most of these were lower powered amps with a great sounding natural tube breakup and many models also featured a unique sounding tube driven tremolo. It had a hypnotic throb and was also capable of hard, choppy tremolo. Combined with the breakup overdriven characteristics of the amplifier, it created a percussive, rhythmic pulse that is very inspiring to play. The Catalinbread Valcoder was designed to recreate the tube tremolo as well as the amplifier breakup of these vintage amplifiers. Separate input and output controls allow you to get anything from a clean tremolo sound all the way up to a gritty tube like breakup driving the tremolo circuit.

Key Features

• Essentially an input gain control. Increasing this control will boost your signal and add harmonic complexity. You can drive the tremolo into a gritty breakup when cranked, or use it as a gritty harmonic booster with the DEPTH control turned off.
• This controls the overall output level of the Valcoder. Setting the INPUT control to minimum and turning up the OUTPUT knob will give you a cleaner tremolo sound that will match your bypassed signal in volume.
• Turning up the INPUT control will add some harmonics and grit as well as volume. The OUTPUT control can be used to attenuate the volume boost available from the INPUT knob should you want to get that gritty harmonic breakup at unity gain.
• The INPUT and OUTPUT controls can also help with the perceived volume drop of turning on a more typical tremolo effect.
• Controls the intensity of the tremolo. Many of the old Valco amps with tremolo only featured a SPEED control. There was no way to get less chop if you wanted. With the addition of this control, it not only makes the Valcoder’s tremolo sounds more versatile but is also allows you to remove the tremolo portion of the circuit completely for use a boost.
• Controls the rate of the tremolo. The speed range was tuned with the classic Valco amp style tremolo in mind. Goes from a moderately slow speed to a fast chop.
• Faster SPEED settings benefit from turning down the DEPTH control as this will soften the chop, or go crazy and crank both for full-on machine gun chatter!

Technical Specifications

Power Source
9-18V DC power supply (sold separately)
Power Usage
15mA
Height
1.33”
Width
2.44”
Depth
4.48”
Weight
.48 lbs.
Battery
9V