It’s been interesting to watch Seymour Duncan’s effects line grow. Pedals like the Vapor Trail Analog Delay strike a nice balance between practicality, simplicity, and thoughtful, performance-centric extra features. The new Catalina analog chorus fits the same mold—thanks in large part to the inclusion of the intriguing “expression” mode, which enables a player to shape the chorus effect with picking dynamics.
Spinning Knobs, Swirling Modes
The Catalina’s blue-sparkle finish makes it look a little like your Uncle Rick’s vintage jet boat—which is awesome. The nameplate’s font also looks like a badge from an early-’60s Pontiac Catalina, enhancing the unit’s personality. Once the effect becomes active, the top LED lights up bright blue. Engaging the expression feature illuminates the threshold knob. It glows blue if you select soft mode, which increases chorus level in response to a softer pick attack, or green for hard mode, which has an inverse response to pick dynamics. The single toggle switch allows you to change between hard and soft modes, and turning the threshold knob clockwise increases the sensitivity to pick dynamics. The remaining four knobs control rate, depth, delay, mix, and tone. Catalina can only be powered with a 9–18V barrel adaptor.
Ratings
Pros:
Great tones. Expression mode is awesome and works very well with other effects.
Cons:
No battery option.
Tones:
Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$229
Seymour Duncan Catalina Dynamic Chorus
seymourduncan.com
Express Yo’ Self!
It’s easy to get really satisfying chorus sounds from the Catalina. With delay, mix, depth, and rate controls at around 2 o’clock, the Catalina takes on rich, deep, and fluttery rotary speaker characteristics. Some chorus effects do the Leslie trick less well than others. But Catalina is a more authentic-sounding stand-in than most. The tone control also proved invaluable for giving the chorus more presence, which was useful when I was using my dark and bassy Les Paul/Fender Twin combination. At higher tone settings, the Catalina also took on many of the bright and detailed characteristics of my favorite Boss CE-2. At darker settings, the Catalina does a great job of adding deep undulating movement to low frequencies, which can also be used, to some extent, to mimic microphone emphasis on the lower horn of a Leslie.
The expression mode adds real value to the Catalina and is a great solution to the problem of chorus effects that can bury picking nuance and sound all-enveloping. The soft mode will be especially appealing to players that like Pixies- or Nirvana-style quiet-to-loud dynamics—among many other potential applications. I used the effect in a song that moved from light picking to chunky, heavy rhythms, and the responsiveness and smooth transition between more- and less-present chorus was impressive. The threshold control helps tailor the dynamic response to your sense of touch. But there’s another benefit: The threshold control can also be used to make the pedal more responsive to particular pickup types. The single-coils from my Fenders benefitted from higher threshold settings. And my preferred dynamics stayed consistent as I moved from single-coils to humbuckers, as long as I set the threshold control accordingly.
The expression control also helps fine tune the Catalina’s compatibility with other effects and enables more extreme settings on the pedal itself. My favorite? A choppy, heavy fuzz mated to the Catalina with all controls (save for threshold) at maximum settings, which resulted in a lightly bubbling and fuzzy picking pattern punctuated by a dementedly undulating lead tone. It’s hard to overstate how nice it is to have this control over a modulation effect just through pick attack.
The Verdict
Classic chorus tones are easy to get from Catalina. But it’s the pedal’s dynamic capacity that makes it special and more practical and appealing for stage use. The $229 tag is on the higher end of the spectrum for a mass-produced chorus. But for a lot of gigging chorus users, the expressive flexibility will be worth every penny.
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Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst have been making music as Shovels & Rope since 2008. The husband-and-wife duo from South Carolina specialize in rootsy, bluesy rock, Americana, and alt-country, but they don’t confine themselves to traditional two-piece arrangements. They switch off on vocal, guitar, percussion, and synth duty throughout their shows, orchestrating a full-band ruckus with all available limbs.
Their seventh full-length, Something Is Working Up Above My Head, released in September last year, and while touring in support of it, they stopped at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl in late February. PG’s John Bohlinger caught up with Trent before the gig to see what tools he and Hearst use to maintain their musical juggling act.
Brought to you by D’Addario.Black Bird
Trent’s not a guitar snob: Generally speaking, he plays whatever he can get his hands on. While playing Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Fest, someone loaned him this Gretsch Black Falcon, and he fell in love with it. He likes its size compared to the broader White Falcon. It’s also the band’s only electric, so if it goes down, it’s back to acoustic. Hearst takes turns on it, too.
Trent loads the heaviest strings he can onto it, which is a set of .013s. It lives in standard tuning.
Ol' Faithful
As Trent explains, he and Hearst have done some DIY decorating on this beautiful Gibson J-45—it’s adorned with sweat droplets, stains, and fingernail dust. It runs direct to the venue’s front-of-house system with an LR Baggs pickup. This one is strung with Martin heavy or medium gauge strings; lighter ones are too prone to snapping under Trent’s heavy picking hand (which holds a Dunlop Max-Grip .88 mm pick). And it rolls around in an Enki tour case.
On Call
These second-stringers—a Loar archtop and an LR Baggs-equipped Recording King—are on hand in case of broken strings or other malfunctions.
Need for Tweed
Trent doesn’t trust amps with too many knobs, so this tweed Fender Blues Junior does the trick. It can get fairly loud, so there’s a Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box on hand to tame it for some stages.
Shovels & Rope's Pedalboard
Because Trent and Hearst trade off bass, guitar, keys, and percussion duties, all four of their limbs are active through the set. Whoever is on guitars works this board, with an MXR Blue Box, Electro-Harmonix Nano Big Muff, EarthQuaker Devices Hummingbird, and Boss OC-5, plus a pair of Walrus Canvas Tuners for the electric and acoustic. Utility boxes on the board include a Walrus Canvas Passive Re-Amp, Radial J48, Livewire ABY1, and a Mesa Stowaway input buffer.
A Roland PK-5 MIDI controller, operated by foot, sits on the lower edge of the board. It controls the board for “Thing 2,” one of two MicroKORG synths onstage.
Thing 1 and Thing 2
There’s no one backstage helping Hearst and Trent cook up all their racket; they handle every sound themselves, manually. During the first few sets of a tour, you’re liable to see some headaches, like forgetting to switch synth patches during a song, but eventually they hit a rhythm.
Affectionately given Seuss-ian nicknames, this pair of microKORGs handles bass notes through the set, among other things, via the foot-controlled PK5. “Thing 1” is set up at the drum station, and runs through a board with an EHX Nano Big Muff, EHX Bass9, EHX Nano Holy Grail, and a Radial Pro DI. A Walrus Aetos keeps them all powered up.
The board for “Thing 2,” beside the guitar amps, includes an EHX Mel9 and Bass9 powered by a Truetone 1 SPOT Pro, plus a Radial ProD2.
