“Part of reimagining old technology is stepping outside the boundaries of possibility”: Catalinbread’s new stompbox tribute to the EMT 140 runs two emulations of the classic plate reverb and runs them in “modulated tandem”

Catalinbread has revised its Talisman reverb pedal by doubling up on the digital simulation of the groundbreaking vintage EMT 140 plate reverb and running them in parallel to create a chorusing effect to your ambience.

The Talisman Ghost builds on the original’s remit, to put an EMT 140 plate reverb into a compact stompbox and expand upon its functionalist. Here, the Portland, Oregan guitar effects specialist takes that to its logical conclusion. If the architecture under the hood is all digital then why not double up on the plates?

This is something that you could not do with the original hardware units. Or if you could, it would be one heavy lift. The EMT 140 is a forklift job, a piece of studio kit comprising sheet metal, weighing in at 600lbs.

Just imagine having to take one of these up the stairs let alone two. You would need Charles Atlas on the studio staff to get it into position. And so a pedalboard solution such as this is not to be sniffed at – it's pretty much doing the impossible.

“This ground-up reimagining took a careful look at the diffusion characteristics of a real EMT 140, bolstered by the luxury of having a second 600-pound behemoth running in parallel, which most studios did not,” says Catalinbread. “This tasteful modulation dramatically opens up the spatial effect of the reverb by giving you the sound of two plates co-mingling with one another in satisfying ways. This serves up a slick post-process doubling effect that lends a sense of dynamics to a normally static reverb decay.”

This doubling yields a lush chorus that applies only to your reverb trails, and Catalinbread gives you plenty of controls over how these simulated reverb plates behave. It can do subtle. It can do dreamy. And quite possibly it might do for plate reverb what Catalinbread’s superlative Topanga did for spring reverb.

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There are five knobs, one footswitch, and you can run the pedal on 9V or 18V DC from a pedalboard power supply (you'll need a minimum of 100mA). There is a Mix dial for setting your wet/dry balance, which can be 100 per cent dry, just your unaffected electric guitar signal passing through, right on to 100 per cent wet.

Volume controls the overall volume. Time controls the length of the reverb trail, from a super-short and boxy room-style decay to “an almost infinite pad”, which should be music to the ears of shoegaze players – and let’s face it, that is a demographic that Catalinbread has been very good to in recent times.

Catalinbread Talisman Ghost // Modulated Plate Reverb - YouTube

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Where it gets interesting is the Tone knob. This is the controls for the Ghost mod, i.e. the aforementioned co-mingling of reverb plate simulators.

Finally, Pre-Delay sets the time for the onset of the reverb, and the further you turn it clockwise the more “detached” your guitar’s signal is from the onset of the reverb. This has a maximum setting of 100ms.

The Talisman Ghost is available now, priced £/$219. See Catalinbread for more details.