Catalinbread Valcoder (Tremolo + Preamp), StarCrash '70s Collection

OVERVIEW

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, among others. 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.

POWER SUPPLY

The Valcoder accepts any good quality filtered and regulated 9-18V DC power supply with a center-negative plug. It can also be run off a 9V battery—the current draw is very low (only 15mA), so a battery can last over 40 hours as long as the input is unplugged when not in use. If you have the means, experiment with the different powering methods and pay attention to how they affect the sound and feel. There are certainly differences between them, and it’s cool to be able to tailor the pedal’s dynamic response for your given set-up in this way!