Catalinbread Cloak
The first solid-state Echoplex that was released found its way into innumerable recording studios, guitarists found themselves plugging into it to extract its wonderful preamp qualities right before hitting the amp. And staying true to that, Catalinbread's original Epoch Boost was billed as something of a “mastering tool”, the finishing touch for your tone. When it came time to head back to the drawing board, the folks at Catalinbread thought of a couple extra variables you could use to craft your perfect EP-3 experience.
They added a Bias control designed to give you a little more gain and body from the stock circuit by simulating out-of-spec parts in the preamp core, so that every pedal is “one of the good ones.” Catalinbread played with the “early” and “later” circuits and found the differences to be a bit too subtle, so we decided to add a well-curated filter knob to take you from early to later and beyond, a tasteful hi-cut that lets you adapt the pedal to your rig, not the other way around. The Preamp control lets you engage a gentle filtering circuit that simulates the Volume control from the original Echoplex, acting on the tone as the echo would have. The stock EP-3 circuit adds only a trivial amount of gain by itself, so we’ve included a Boost knob to wring as much gain from it as possible, giving you a real punch where you need it. It’s intended as their most tweakable EP-3 offering to date.
Catalinbread Epoch Bias // Guitar Preamp Pedal
Features
PREAMP: This essentially acts as the “Volume” knob from the EP-3, which is to say it’s not really a volume knob at all. That control was named such because it was the mix knob for the tape echo output, mixed with some of the “loading-down” of that echo side. At its core, it is a wet-dry mix control. But because there’s no echo here, the knob pans between “nothing” and the preamp. And when this knob is all the way down, that’s exactly what you hear: nothing. It sounds like a volume control until noon, and beyond that, it imparts some subtle frequency enhancement, on account of the loading simulation circuit. The loudest point on this knob is at about 2 o’clock.
BOOST: Adds extra gain and volume to the circuit. When this control is set all the way down, it simulates the stock EP-3 circuit.
BIAS: The original EP-3 pre-circuit had a fixed gain and volume, dependent on one resistor value in the circuit. But because part tolerances were all over the place at the time of the EP-3’s release, there was quite a bit of variance in the overall gain in the preamp. This knob lets you dial that value in, to run the circuit hot or cold. Think of it as a gain control and a body enhancer. This control also makes light crackling noises as it is being turned, this is normal.
FILTER: The first few hundred EP-3 units that came off the assembly line featured a slightly different preamp circuit than the rest, a little brighter than stock. And when we say “a little”, we mean it. The Filter control adds a tastefully-designed and gentle hi-cut filter that purposefully exaggerates the differences a little more than either mode, for a more refined, bluesier tone that sounds great regardless of knob position.
For more information, please visit catalinbread.com.
Catalinbread Epoch Bias Boost, Overdrive, and Preamp Pedal
Bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun played guitar, as well as several other instruments, on her first three albums under the Myrkur name. This time, she handed the 6-strings to Will Hayes.
Myrkur has often been described as a one-woman band. And while Bruun does write all of the music and lyrics, Spine was very much a collaborative effort between Bruun, guitarist Will Hayes, producer Randall Dunn, and technical assistant Úlfur Hannson, who did most of the synthesizer programming, sound design, and string arrangements. Bruun, whose inspiration for the album was drawn from her experience as a new mother, elaborates on the challenges that the collaboration created for her: “I had to grow with the assignment. That is not natural to me. I am a complete control freak. Myrkur is such a strong vision, and so personal. Then after I became a mom, I had to realize I have no control the way I thought I did.”
MYRKUR - Valkyriernes Sang (Official Audio)
Bruun and Hayes were introduced to each other by Dunn back in 2017, when Bruun was working on her third album, Mareridt. Hayes was a session musician in the band that Dunn had arranged for Bruun, when her plans to put together a group of Danish musicians in Copenhagen fell through. Where on Mareridt and Bruun’s two albums preceding it, she contributed parts on nearly every instrument, on Spine, she ceded all of the guitar work to Hayes.
On Spine, Hayes worked with Bruun and producer Randall Dunn to fine-tune his tone for each song.
“The process was similar on both albums,” Hayes describes. “Amalie’s songs were fully written, so the chord changes, vocal parts, and lyrics were all there, with riffs and additional instrumental ideas included in the demos.” His responsibilities in both cases were to “learn the music and come in with ideas about how to activate what’s there, and bring out the depth of the songwriting.
“Mareridt feels more metallic and jagged, and a very Northwest sound,” Hayes elaborates. “On Spine, the songwriting is more in focus, and the ‘metal band’ features are more of a faint transmission coming through, overlapping with other elements. With the guitars, it’s more about how they’re layered with synths in the production. The sound is holographic.”
“I had to grow with the assignment. That is not natural to me. I am a complete control freak.”—Amalie Bruun
The music that came from the demos for Spine—three of which had, as Bruun calls it, “emotional and spiritual involvement” from Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan—were expanded tremendously in the studio. (Corgan produced Daggers, the second album she released with her past project, Ex Cops.) After Bruun would leave the studio for the day, Dunn, Hayes, and Hansson would work on the various layers to present in the final product. These included strings, synth programming, and vocal harmonies.
WIll Hayes' Gear
On his solo projects, Hayes has experimented with audio-to-MIDI conversion, where he generates MIDI with his guitar.
Photo by Cassandra Croft
Guitars
- Custom Dunable Yeti baritone
- Gibson SG
- Martin acoustic
- Fender Precision Bass
Amps
- Sunn Model T with Hiwatt cabinet (Royer ribbon mics)
Effects
- Klon clone
- Vintage Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer
- Hologram Electronics Microcosm
- Universal Audio A/DA Flanger
- OTO Machines BAM Space Generator Reverb
- The GigRig Wetter Box
- Lehle Mono Volume Pedal
- Lehle Dual Expression Pedal
- Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water K-Field Modulator
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball 6-String Baritone Slinky Nickel Wound (.013–.072)
- Dunlop Gator Grip .71 mm
Hayes explains, “I feel like the secret to this record is that it’s a singer-songwriter record, but with this whole landscape surrounding it. A lot of the guitars are very austere and a lot of the layering and the instrumentation is fitting together in a way that gives things a depth of field.”
Spine’s first three tracks immediately establish an interconnected atmosphere while still being distinct from one another. “Bålfærd” features a drone from a hurdy-gurdy, emanating behind vocals, acoustic strums, and synthesizer washes. “Like Humans” leads with malevolent harmony and martial drums before an anthemic chorus. “Mothlike” is another early highlight: Voice and synthesizer establish a dance-club-like groove—think refreshed Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart—morphing in and out of a wall of distortion, Bruun’s screams, and a brief but epic guitar solo from Arjan Miranda, who guested on Dunn’s invitation. “Arjan has lived and breathed NWOBHM [new wave of British heavy metal] and Mercyful Fate,” says Hayes, “and that’s totally the type of old-school solo that was called for on that song.”
“It’s less about conscious genre-mixing, and it’s more associative.”—Will Hayes
For Hayes’ parts, he shares, “The influences varied song to song and sometimes by part. For instance, the flanged-out riff during the chorus of ‘Blazing Sky?’ The idea was to have a cold liquid part there, so Cocteau Twins naturally became a reference we agreed on. It’s less about conscious genre-mixing, and it’s more associative: For the different roles a guitar part might play in the arrangement, there are different stylistic influences to plug in.”
After being laid off from a warehouse job, Hayes applied to the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where he went on to study classical composition.
Photo by Abby Williamson
Hayes’ guitar work acts as a foil to Bruun’s enchanting, mythological-siren-like vocal, providing an unexpectedly ideal complement with heavy, overdriven, churning chordal textures, carefully articulated lines, and at times aggressive tremolo picking. Among his approaches to black metal in general is a knowledge of how to implement the third, which he says can simulate the sound of a bowed instrument. “When you’re tremolo picking across whole chords, there’s a blurriness to that and an aleatoric nature to how you can activate the chord and stretch the rhythmic particles to act as texture, which can morph and be impressionistic.”
Hayes grew up listening to metal, learning to play guitar by mastering Slayer and Megadeth riffs, eventually gravitating towards “more extreme bands” such as Sepultura, Sarcófago, Morbid Angel, Celtic Frost, Bathory, and Mayhem. He began writing his own music as a teenager, and when he was laid off from a warehouse job at the age of 19, he decided to take a step towards a career in music. He applied to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and was accepted. There, he studied classical composing.
Absorbing his professor Wayne Horvitz’s lessons and music, he says, was “really pivotal for me. I learned a lot from him about how to use harmony and tonal ambiguity to evoke complex emotions, and he helped me break out of some writing tropes I had picked up from metal. Also, [I was influenced by] his estranged approach to American music, and methods of combining composition with improvisation.” Horvitz, who played with John Zorn’s Naked City, was a part of the Downtown scene of improvisers in the ’80s in New York City. “Through that entry point,” says Hayes, “I got really interested in free improvisation, and learning about other musicians he played with.”
Through his studies, Hayes was exposed to avant-garde and 20th-century classical music: Morton Feldman, Maurice Ravel, and Arnold Schoenberg; and medieval and Renaissance music, by Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, and Hildegard of Bingen. Today, he names Ornette Coleman’s album Skies of America, Charles Ives’ “Three Places in New England, III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” Nico’s “The Falconer,” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” as some of his favorite music. “I’m really drawn to extremes on all sides,” he explains, “and to artists and pockets of music that are idiosyncratic and culturally, or counter-culturally, severe.
“Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone is one of my favorites,” he continues. “There’s nothing else that really sounds like that, even within their catalog. It’s not really even a metal record; it sounds more like folk music from the center of the Earth or something.”
Hayes, who first met Bruun in 2017 for the recording of her album Mareridt, performed all of the guitar parts on Spine.
The main guitar Hayes played on the album was a customized Dunable Yeti. He requested a baritone version, with a custom pickup configuration: three split-coil humbuckers, each with a 3-way switch, for “optimal tone-sculpting. I wanted a guitar with a wide range, and a versatile instrument I could use for low metal and also for clean, cold baritone stuff, like the Cure or Glen Campbell-style deep baritone sounds. It’s really become my axe that I use for everything.”
To develop the guitar parts for Spine, Bruun and Dunn would confer on which tone they wanted, and then present a few options to Hayes. “Randall’s use of gear is always to accomplish specific creative goals, and evoke something emotional,” Hayes observes. Sometimes the process of arriving at those goals would begin with a piece of gear or an effect chain, and the guitar part would serve as a means to “activating the gear.”
“It’s a way to morph different styles of playing into one another, and exciting collisions occur when you’re writing or improvising.”—Will Hayes
Among Hayes’ pedals are a Klon clone, a vintage Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer, and a Hologram Electronics Microcosm granular looper and glitch pedal. He likes to get experimental when working with them and others in his collection. “I’ve gotten really into parallel signal chains in my pedal rig, and crossfading between them expressively. For instance, having a clean channel and a distorted channel, each with their own color and modulation options. And then I have this mixer pedal called a Wetter Box by GigRig, which takes an expression pedal, so I can mix between signal A and signal B in real time with my foot. It’s a way to morph different styles of playing into one another, and exciting collisions occur when you’re writing or improvising.”
Another method he uses along these lines is crossfading higher and lower octave chains, each with their own distinct modulation and rhythmic effect. He currently uses the Microcosm on his higher octave chain. “It samples what you’re playing and explodes it into a cloud of granulated fragments.”
Alongside Myrkur and his other session work, Hayes also performs as a solo artist, and creates music and sound design for film, dance, and theater projects. In his solo work, he’s explored audio-to-MIDI conversion, using the Virtual Studio Technology plugin MIDI Guitar 2 and the Fishman TriplePlay. The technology, which enables him to program synths, samplers, and arpeggiators using the MIDI generated by his guitar, now plays a significant role in his sound design and electronic music. “It’s funny, the way these products are marketed doesn’t seem to fully illuminate the creative potential of the technology,” he shares. “It can get really deep, especially through designing original sound. I’m excited to see MIDI employed creatively by more and more guitarists.”
“To me, the pioneering extreme bands were groups of kids who were spiritually searching.”—Will Hayes
And while Hayes clearly exhibits that adventurous nature in both production and artistic tastes, it’s clear that metal, the genre that got him into music in the first place, still speaks to him above all else. “There’s something really exciting about an overt expression of evil [in metal]. To me, the pioneering extreme bands were groups of kids who were spiritually searching. Making a song where you’re basically saying, ‘This is the most evil thing that can happen,’ is like its own moralistic backstop against real evil.”
He continues, “I’ve noticed for many musicians and producers in creative music right now, metal is a bit of a lingua franca. There is power to this music that really doesn’t exist anywhere else, so for people who have spent their lives seeking out transformative sonic experiences, it’s no surprise that the canon of extreme metal is so important.”
When it comes to studio tricks, many recording engineers had to invent their own effects. Double tracking and flanging started as manual manipulations of magnetic tape and the machinery used to process it. One such effect is gated reverb, the combination of digital reverb and noise gate, “invented” in the ‘70s but popularized in the ‘80s by one Phil Collins. Like many now-legendary effects, gated reverb was invented by accident using the Solid State Logic SL4000 Talkback Mic channel and AMS RMX16 digital reverb units. The premise is simple enough: the gate is a function of the signal strength; once the signal level drops below an adjustable threshold, the reverb tail snaps shut. Our CBX recreates this magical symbiosis with an overdrivable preamp, adjustable reverb lag time and a full wet-dry blend. The result is a lovely and expressive “always-on” reverb that stays in its lane and won’t interfere with the all-important mix.
Controls
Lag: This adjusts the delay between the original note played and the onset of the gate. You can use the lower half of the control to fine-tune your picking attack, and just past noon gives you slapback and reverse-esque sounds. Think of it as a pre-delay control for the gate.
Gate: Controls the sensitivity of the gate. Keep this low for the least amount of gating and longest reverb trails, turn up for running higher gain devices before or making the effect more subtle. When the Gate knob is all the way down, the gate is removed from the circuit. This can be manipulated with your guitar's volume control by lowering the signal level and forcing the gate to clamp shut.
Mix: Controls the balance between dry and wet signals. When set to its minimum, you will hear just the dry signal fed through the preamp. At maximum, the reverberated signal is the only thing present.
Verb: On a reverb pedal with no gate, this would control how long the reverb tail rings out. But since there’s a gate, this essentially governs the thickness of the reverb. Setting this knob low gives some mild reverberation and maxing it out gives a huge, harmonically rich reverb sound.
Pre: Controls the level of the onboard preamp.
The Spaces In-Beween The Space | Catalinbread CBX Gated Reverb
Catalinbread CBX Gated Reverb Pedal
For more information, please visit catalinbread.com.
Catalinbread's original DLS circuit has been tweaked and upgraded throughout, now featuring a phase inverter, power amp sim and output transformer as well as some new features and the most requested modifications for the original. One such addition is a toggle switch on the outside to select between Super Lead and Super Bass modes, and they've also externalized the Presence knob to easily dial in your preferred Marshall flavor.
Also added is a piece of the Dirty Little Secret—a single preamp tube simulator—as a built-in boost circuit that can be used independently of the main circuit. You can run the boost and DLS in any order you like; put the boost before the DLS for a high-powered saturated tone or after to pummel the front end of your amp. A new tightness knob lets you shave off the sub-bass for a little extra clarity or completely attenuate the low end for some cool thrash metal tones. A Line Out jack gives you a dedicated +10dB output that you can use with a mixer or DAW, and you can use both outputs simultaneously. Between the Boost, order selector and the external Super Lead/Super Bass modes, the Dirty Little Secret Deluxe is engineered to be a total performance tool that does the line justice.
