Our favorite takeaway from the review? ” This works equally well on loud tube stacks as on the more neighbour friendly setup, which makes the Olympia an excellent choice for your bedroom amp and low volume levels. If you’re looking for classic fuzz tones but need something a bit more versatile or bedroom friendly, then look no further. The Olympia delivers and gets my warmest recommendation.” By design, we pushed Olympia hard because while lots of fuzzes can sound terrific with a large and loud tube amp clipping and compressing, most of us depend on cleaner, smaller, more club friendly amps and need the fuzz to also brings heat and punch.

Check out the full review here, or click below on the video to enjoy watching the superb demo by Bjorn Riis at Gilmourish.com. To find an Olympia of your own to try out, visit our Purchase/Retailers page.

Hi – I received my Icarus last wk and I just wanted to mention how much I love it!
This proves all clean boosts are not created equal, that’s for sure. I also notice at high gigging volumes that the 18V makes a difference in a competitive band mix….
…its relatively subtle, but there is definitely more pick attack that pops thru and the pedal is a little ‘larger’ and rounder sounding.  Just seems a bit more ‘alive’ at 18v when the whole band is rocking. The tone control is super useful and it voiced wonderfully -

I play a Marshall AFD100 with 4 x 6550′s and its a “above 2k” beast – that little tone knob allows me to get the hi-end just right with the volume du jour and my different gtrs. Its alot easier than messing with the mid-treble-presence combination on the head all the time.
Anyway – great job – I can’t imagine playing without it now. One of those rare pedals that meshes right in and becomes part of the amp rather than seeming/sounding like an ‘add-on’.

I really liked this email, so I asked the writer if we could quote him. This was his reply:

Sure Philippe, you can use a quote. FYI, I am the FOH (editor’s note: front of house sound) engineer for Keith Urban, if that adds some street cred to any quote you might wanna use.

Uh, wait, uh…absolutely YEAH! As in Tom, this guy – front of house engineer for Keith Urban, Alice in Chains, Garbage, Marilyn Manson, ZZ Top, Stone Temple Pilots, Veruca Salt, Shakira, and countless others. So yeah, when a guy who is trusted to run the sound for these stars has one of our pedals in his personal rig, that does add some cred in our book.

We’ve said that we’ve always aimed our stuff to rock out live and fit well in a mix, and this person tells us he uses one of our pedals for his personal rig, that is some serious affirmation. We assure you that the Icarus™ that Tom purchased is the same one we make for each and every one of our customers, available from our great retailers. To find one for yourself, visit our retailers list here.

This has been a long time coming for us. We’re thrilled to announce the pending release of our Kilobyte™ lo-fi digital delay pedal. Read more to see how you can order this pedal.

Using a digital delay chip for echoes, we’ve tailored an analog dry path that maintains the integrity of your guitar signal, then followed it with a dedicated overdrive/boost preamp that only affects the repeats. After the digital chip does its dirty magic and creates repeats, the Kilobyte then allows you to blend those echoes back in with your unaffected signal for a powerful, warm, and dynamic tone.

The Kilobyte™ is available until 10pm EST Friday, January 18th via Kickstarter. If you are interested, you can visit our project page and order one of the first Kilobyte pedals here. Below is the video and teaser trailer for the project. This video was shot and edited by Greg Slattery, and audio was recorded and edited by Zac Thomas at the Jam Room Music Studio here in Columbia, SC.

And here is a demo we just finished where we go a bit more in depth on some of the features, namely the purity of the analog (dry) signal path, dirty echoes, and the fun oscillations. This video was shot by Jessica Oswalt, edited by Michael Coleman, and audio was recorded and edited by Eric McCoy at Archer Avenue Recording Studio in Columbia, SC.

(One thing that Grantland’s “Rembert Explains the ’80s” segment on this video gets absolutely right: there is nothing quite like watching this video with a person who was not alive when this album came out. The comically beautiful thing about mediocre art is how dated it instantly feels. For a young person, there are no shortage of moments that aren’t completely mind-boggling.)

So why would I believe that this curious nugget captures the 1980s, rather than actually good music? I do not believe that the aesthetic of a decade is defined by its greatest works. Once you get past the certain aesthetic quibbles, great works in any era have the potential to be timeless. My sophomore English teacher assigned “Catcher in the Rye” to us and was completely unsurprised to find that over half of us had finished the book the next day. To a group of teenage boys in 1986, this contemporary novel written thirty five years earlier felt as vital and real to us as if it were written the day before.

To truly grasp the feel for an era, you have to examine examples of their commercially plausible mediocrity. My former bandmate Tim used to call Against All Odds the perfect 1980s movie. Jeff Bridges is playing an aging NFL player (The Dude, right?!? Playing football?!?) hired by creepy James Woods, wearing James Spader’s creepy white sport coat, to track down his missing girlfriend. Sex scenes, car chases, and other nonsenses ensue, punctuated by a first world understanding of Mayan cities and a surprisingly resilient Phil Collins soundtrack tune. None of the plots make any sense, but between the convertibles, suits, exotic locales, Rachel Ward, and professional football, it all seemed acceptable enough to gross what would have been a solid $50 million domestic take for an adult romantic thriller in current dollars. Even if it’s THE DUDE AS A WIDEOUT ON A PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM. (And in the mid 1980s as well, decades before the rules changes that created a market for Danny Amendolas to run eight yard curls from the slot all day).

The video for “Heartbeat” operates along those same lines. There are mysterious revolutionaries who straddle some nefarious line between Zapatistas and a menacing BMX gang from an afterschool special. There are knuckle-less drummer gloves, Steinberger headless basses and Dweezil Zappa wearing a pastel colored, pointy Jackson Soloist guitar very high. The musicians perform with unplugged electric instruments on a stage that resembles a Rubik’s cube; the backup singers have borrowed black dresses from the singers on Pink Floyd’s “Momentary Lapse of Reason” Tour, and the sound is processed to outshine the gleaming city on the hill of Ronald Reagan’s America.

Bringing it all together is Don Johnson and his freakishly perfect stubble that sold a lot of Braun trimmers; only Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior has facial hair that remotely compares. While wearing something akin to a high-waisted version of MC Hammer’s genie pants with a belt that’s nearly a foot wide, he’s rocking out WAY harder than whatever that Richard Marx guy is going to do next year. He’s a photojournalist covering some protests, overseeing a fashion shoot, pursuing some bleeding heart white woman activist sympathizer who may or may not be token Baywatch brunette Alexandra Paul, and singing next to Dweezil in the white sport coat James Woods still hasn’t returned to Spader. When Johnson hurls a small child over a bunker, he’s showing that he’s both a man of action and a man of kindness; if this was a feature length film, you’d be certain that at least one casting director was still upset that they did not cast The Swayze.

Bob Ezrin once used cocaine to explain the bad musical decisions of the 1970s like Kiss’s “Music For the Elder”. “Heartbeat” (which by the way, was made into an entire feature length concept music video for the entire album, I kid you not) reeks of other 1980s excesses. There is a preposterous amount of star power contributing on the album: Tom Petty, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Barbra Streisand, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Omar Hakim, and countless others. A single explosion in the “Heartbeat” video costs more than most product placement funded music videos today. Somebody had to gamble that Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice would make a successful album, and in those days when there still was money to be made in the music industry, a Top 10 Billboard single could really pay for an A&R man’s rent in Manhattan.

I’ll give credit where credit is due. The Dude was pretty fit in Against All Odds. And Don Johnson doesn’t hit all the notes, but he hits a lot more of them than most actors today would without a hefty dose of Antares Auto-Tune. When Don delivers a classic Truck Driver’s Gear Change for the last choruses, you can feel the same formula on the calculator from “Living on a Prayer” or “Take My Breath Away”, before the ’90s would arrive and somebody would turn down the reverb in the vocals, film with natural light, and  repeatedly hit the MC, C and CE keys.

We said it was quick and easy to remember. The quick of it is the following: get in, get something memorable, get gone. 

Sounds easy, right? It’s tougher than it sounds. What the Jewel Thief™ approach asks of you is the opposite of a thematic directive you’ve been taught as an educated person in any kind of developed  Western civilization or educational system: more is better. More right answers on the test equals a better grade. More better grades means more college choices, more job offers. More time in the office equals more money, more happiness, more of the pie for you. More weight lifting means more muscle. More time getting your look right makes you more likely to impress your date. More beer means more courage. And so on.

It’s time to consider getting *more* by doing *less* while focusing on doing those things well.

GET IN  Here’s one of the more direct, difficult and soul-searching questions we should consider when we’re given the opportunity to play a lead part: why do you even want to play a lead part here?

We all get it: playing *lead* guitar is both fun and satisfying to the ego. To say ”I play LEAD guitar” says I’m special, I’m a leader. It sounds like an important title, terse yet not without some pomp and the whiff of assigned authority. The lead guitar player is not just some Sergeant, but is Sergeant Major; not the bishop, but the Archbishop. It declares some kind of special skill that requires its bearer be credited with an adjective above and beyond the bare descriptive of ‘guitar player’. And such a player wouldn’t be playing lead guitar or calling themselves the lead guitar player unless the rest of the band thought he or she wasn’t great, right?

Well, here’s the ugly secret all of us who play with any degree of seriousness know deep down inside: being a lead guitar player is not that hard, and doesn’t require any certification to call yourself one. Doing it well, intelligently, and exceptionally can be a lifelong difficult pursuit that can require actual, genuine work. But the instant you learn a minor pentatonic or blues scale – usually around week three or four of most formal one-on-one guitar instruction, or the third or fourth time of getting that person who knows everything to come by and show you some stuff – you can, and probably did, start playing LEAD guitar.

If the purpose of even playing lead guitar is to impress people, and show them just “how good you are at lead guitar”, a skill set that may have a less challenging introductory learning curve than DIY automobile repairs, tuneful singing or embarrassment-free dancing, think back to the times you’ve been impressed with a guitar player based on some acrobatic display of chops. Now think back to being horrified by some lackluster hack endlessly loudly wanking away in the guitar store trying to impress people. Guess what? They were both going for the same thing with their musical goals.

Instead of planning around how you want to be perceived via some title or role, let’s think about the music. Do you have something musically to say, or is your playing a lead part some thing you feel you’re owed, as befits your rights, privilege, and status as a *lead* guitar player, like some kind of…entitlement? Yuck. Get in that song. What would you want to hear? What would you like the listener to feel? What kind of tone might make this different or fun to listen to? Is there a musical purpose to your lead guitar part? Cutting to the chase – what do you really want to say?

GET SOMETHING MEMORABLE Here’s where things can go in any number of different directions. Johnny Marr of The Smiths once said on MTV that he imagined his guitar parts more like piano parts, to take his focus away from traditional patterns and playing. Many players I know can hum the solo to “Stairway to Heaven” or “You Shook Me (All Night Long)” even if they haven’t heard it for years. Most of the guitar solos we call the “greatest ever” are genuinely melodic and memorable – heck, even “Eruption” and its hummingbird winged tremolo picking moments are playing parts that many listeners could repeat.

So why is it then that when given the chance to express themselves in a lead break, most guitar players instantly just start playing finger patterns and licks?

One of the first experiences that planted the seed of the Jewel Thief idea in my head came while listening to Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. When they played at my university in the early 1990s, everybody I knew in the dorm after their show said something along the lines of “well damn, that guitar player sure can play”. I don’t think he threw anything flashier than an eighth note, and that might have been by accident. But the collected body of memorable, great *sounding* work he presented over the course of the evening definitely entertained and made an impression on an audience.

Here’s an example that I find particularly interesting: Mike Campbell’s contributions to Don Henley’s “Boys Of Summer”

His short lead breaks start at 0:10, 1:24, and 2:51, with a short stab right before the second chorus at 1:58. At no point in his lead breaks does Campbell take away from the tune, and he manages to work with, rather than against, both the ostinato keyboard part that is the primary hook of the song, and the oscillating synth swells that preface each of his phrases. Each of the three short breaks is finished more aggressively than the one before; first with a delicately hanging, unresolved pull off note, the second time with a firm plucked slide down the low E string, and on the third, digging in with a menacing, overdriven minor key double stop before the final verse. Finally, he closes the song with a memorable, chiming repeated phrase of ear-candy over the chorus progression from 4:13 to the finish, mirroring the aforementioned keyboard hook throughout the verses and bringing a song with a moody, mostly minor feel to an uplifting, major resolution.

As Walter Sobchak would say, “Dude, he was the rug that really tied the room together.” It’s pretty amazing what you can do musically when you do it with musical purposes.

GET GONE And now for your final challenge: like a jewel thief, you want to get out in a hurry without overstaying your welcome. You’ve gotten what you came for with your lead break. Now it’s time to make an exit. That means now, cause when the police siren (drum fill/singer) arrives after bar 8, bar 12, or 16 (pushing your luck) comes, it’s time for you to be done.

“But I want to play more!” you think. “I have so much more of my playing that I’m capable of showing!” you say. “I meant, I have so much more I’m wanting to say!”

Really, do you think you have more to show and say than Eddie Van Halen in 1977 during the recording of Van Halen I?

Here was a young, 22 year old legendary and gifted gunslinger who was FULL of stuff to legitimately introduce to the world at this moment in time. His fabled “brown sound” tone was innovative, he’s about to popularize and use a finger tapping technique in this genre unlike anyone before, and he’s already turned away offers from huge bands to do things the way he and his mates have been working towards for years. He’s readying for an arrival, and everyone around him, from his bandmates to producers, label execs and audiences can sense that it’s going to be world-changing for rock guitar in a way unlike anyone since Jimi Hendrix.

And what will be the first song, on the first album, that will introduce the world to this legend? Well, that would be “Running With The Devil”.

The melodic lead break starts at 1:59, and ends at 2:09, a mere ten seconds and four bars (!) later. When he comes back for more at 2:59, he again repeats the same melodic four bars! This is the greatest flash guitar player in rock history, and he plays it close to the vest like a ninja and bails out early on both opportunities, grabbing the listener’s ear but leaving plenty on the table. Why?

First off, the part he played was the best thing for the song, and exactly what his lead break was intended to achieve. “Running With The Devil” was not to introduce the singular Eddie Van Halen, but to introduce the world to Van Halen as a band with a distinctive attitude, gift for melody and swagger. These qualities are grander, badder, and more rock and roll dangerous than demonstrating somebody’s finger dexterity or techniques. But secondly, EVH could back up his restraint because, as we came to learn over the course of that album, and the next thirty four years and counting, Eddie Van Halen had plenty more where that came from. He didn’t need to prove it and show every chop he had in every solo he did on every song. He didn’t need to waste his veritable arsenal of sonic tricks and chops and repeat himself endlessly. It was like he was telling the world “trust me, you’ll know when I decide to fight you right handed.”

If you love music, and plan to contribute lead breaks on guitar, consider playing things with a specific musical purpose, making something melodic and memorable, and getting to the point. Get in, get something memorable, get out. You might find that your library of chops can go further, you’ll play better and more unselfishly with your mates as an integral part of the song rather than on top of or in front of it, and maybe most importantly, by playing something that you intentionally mean to play, you might play something that much more meaningful.

© Caroline Guitar Co 11/09/2012

Since Gorby is beautiful on the outside, we figured it might be fun to use this pedal to show how we do things on the inside. Whether you purchase a Wave Cannon, Olympia, Icarus, Cannonball, or contact us for some kind of re-house or custom build, you can rest assured that not only will we apply the same commitment to quality with your pedal as we did with Gorby below, but as we learn more and continue to improve our craft, we will apply what we’ve learned to make your pedal the best we’ve made yet.

To find where you can pick up a Caroline Guitar Company pedal of your own, please visit our retailers page and drop them a line or pay them a visit.