Catalinbread Pareidolia review

Re-creating classic tremolo

  • £153
  • $189.99
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MusicRadar Verdict

Vintage tremolo with a distinctive voice revisited. And, yes, you'll be mesmerised by it.

Pros

  • +

    Vintage tones executed superbly.

Cons

  • -

    Very few.

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Over the years, Fender had three basic designs of tremolo circuit built into its amps and the most aurally intriguing is the 'harmonic tremolo' (based around a dual-band filtering effect) once briefly found in early-60s 'Brownface' amps.

The Pareidolia offers a re-creation, delivered via standard tremolo depth and rate knobs, coupled with a volume knob that hits unity gain at about midway, so can give your amp a nice kick (turn the depth down and you can use it as a pure boost).

An LED pulses in time with rate and intensifies its colour change as depth is increased.

Sound-wise, what you get is tremolo- based but it's not just amplitude (volume) modulation that's goingon here - there are elements of both phasing and pitch modulation, somewhat akin to a Uni-Vibe or rotary speaker, casting a gorgeous otherworldly haze over the tremolo.

Trevor Curwen

Trevor Curwen has played guitar for several decades – he's also mimed it on the UK's Top of the Pops. Much of his working life, though, has been spent behind the mixing desk, during which time he has built up a solid collection of the guitars, amps and pedals needed to cover just about any studio session. He writes pedal reviews for Guitarist and has contributed to Total Guitar, MusicRadar and Future Music among others.