Initial Impressions/Review - Catalinbread Valcoder

Well after much deliberation I finally decided to go with the Catalinbread Valcoder and I will say the main thing that sold me was the size, I heard the sound clips and it sounded great but very much like a trem (Obvious huh) but didn't make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

So it arrived on Wednesday and I didn't get to try it till last night (Thursday) and I've not had loads of time with it, but straight off it blew my mind. I've never had a trem pedal before I've used the effect a bit in multis and not really ever thought about it again it was bought to give my modular pedal synth setup throbby sounds (Which we will come back to). Well this trem is fantastically transparent I can only presume there is a slight volume boost when on due to what Bongo has said about trems as this one you turn it on and you don't lose your signal it just gets choppy and it's fantastic straight out of the box. You can do light shimmer to full on throb about a second apart. To me it's like having a delay that will never muddy up the sound and for chords and things I'm loving the way it doesn't affect my tone like a phaser or chorus do (They have there place as well.)

Features and build quality wise it has everything you need 2 knobs one for depth and one for speed, there is also a trim inside to adjust the volume. The light flashes to the pulse of the trem but heres the really cool thing, the intensity of the light is set by the depth so if you have the depth on full the light goes on and off if you have it just half way or so it dims and then goes on full, its a really cool feature and I found my self watching the light while playing to set tempos and stuff of chords.

So yes this is my initial review and I'll do a more in depth one in the next few days with soundclips.

Enjoy