PARABOLA SPECIAL ADVANCE : (scroll to bottom just to buy)
Pictured here is one of our PARABOLA test pieces: a solid state, transistor generated waveform tremolo. The oscillator is strongly influenced by the vintage Schaller TR-68/TR-316 “West Germany” tremolo pedals that I fell in love with in the 1990s. They have a gorgeous analog waveform that actually changes shape with the depth control, and a feel that is unlike anything I’d ever played before or since.
Beyond a faithful approach to the transistor LFO, there are a host of improvements we’ve made. The Parabola’s volume control has more than enough output to compensate for any perceived volume loss of the tremolo effect – in fact, it’s up to +12db of clean gain – AND there is a gorgeous preamplifier drive stage based on the “invader” preamp of our Kilobyte and Météore pedals, so you can crank the gain and generate drive at any volume. You can think of the Parabola as an additional “tremolo channel” for your setup.
The AM mode is the classic Schaller amplitude modulation, gorgeous and wobbly, like sloshing through deep puddles with your rain boots on. The “FM” mode is a frequency dependent ‘filtered’ mode based on the depth control that manages to create a shimmering effect that gets out of the way of your playing. The Speed, Fast/Slow, and Depth ranges have been improved both from the (often incorrect) Schaller schematics people post online and the real deal vintage TR-68s we traced, and the Depth can be easily zero’d out to allow you to just use the gorgeous preamp and booster. And the Havoc “inverts” whichever speed range you’ve chosen and opens up the depth control, so you can momentarily “juice” or “drag” the effect on demand.
As per our tradition with advance releases, we’ll be doing these in an exclusive color scheme not to be repeated (in this case, it will be a textured black with mint green print), we will be including a t-shirt, and we will be donating a significant portion of our sales proceeds to a nonprofit organization, and like the others before, this one is near and dear to my heart: The South Carolina Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Over the last 25 years, the teen birth rate in South Carolina has fallen by 67%, and we’d like for that trend to continue. Federal grant funds for teen-pregnancy organizations such as the South Carolina Campaign are slated to be cut, and while our contribution cannot make up for that, it will still be valuable to them and send a message that we believe in their efforts. Full disclosure: my lovely wife completed her doctoral internship with the SC Campaign and now works in the program research and evaluation department of this organization. I love the work that she gets to do – they’re not just winging it or pushing preconceived, ideological notions of what people should do, but fully evaluating what practices actually work for each of the communities they partner with to continue creating better outcomes for young people.
The advance limited pedals will ship by EOY2017 or shortly thereafter with a special t-shirt and a patch, so make sure we get your size on that drop-down menu. International shipments will have an additional surcharge. I know it’s a leap of faith, with no demos, and just a picture. As the first company to ever crowdfund an effects pedal with Kickstarter, and has done three charitable, advance special releases since, our track record speaks for itself. We look forward to making this pedal for you.
WAVE CANNON MKII, “1985” EDITION
We’ll also be making a version of this for our retailers, but we had to give you guys a chance to get one of these first. This is our Wave Cannon MKII with a slight gain tweak and silicon diodes, as opposed to our LED clipping in the standard “red” WC2.
This thing is more compressed and hairy, and man, it is so, so, so nasty. I think I wasted a healthy part of my afternoon with humbucker-loaded guitars playing Alice in Chains riffs, Kings X “Dogman”, Van Halen’s “House of Pain”, and every blast of Iron Maiden from my childhood that I had available to memory.
And it goes without saying that the Wave Cannon Havoc feedback is still more fun than a distortion pedal should get to be. Put it first in your chain, stomp it down and make the whistles go “woo, woo!” Make your guitar sing a siren song that says “the world you believed in before no longer exists, and hiding under your desk like your teachers coached you to do will not save you.”
AMBULANCE BUFFER & PATCH
This is just a little something-something we’ve always had the goods to do, and finally just want to make a batch of for our customers. We’d been setting aside the little circuit boards, we had a pile of enclosures, boxes and bags, and said “wait, why have we NOT done this before???”
So for this holiday season, if you need a buffer to help preserve your signal fidelity through those long cable runs and that maze of a signal chain you’re running, you can pick up a USA hand-made, high z (500k) in and low z (<1k) out buffer with the patch for the same price or cheaper than the foreign made, mass produced stuff out there.
And if you don’t think you’d need a buffer, check this sweet detail out: it has a switch. That’s right. You can plug in, power it up, and actually tell right away whether a buffer would be to your benefit or not. Or you can leave it on, then turn it off if you’ve got a Wave Cannon or Fuzz Face downstream from it that doesn’t like a low-z signal.
HAYMAKER LIMITED BLACK/SILVER EDITION
Just a few of these left. Been quite a run. Our bestselling, most versatile drive device, in a limited black and silver version with a couple gain tweaks and a Russian D9E diode in the clipping network, just because we can. Compared to our standard Haymaker, I like the classic mode A a bit less, mode B about the same, and the hard clipped mode C even better. That’s just me being candid with you guys.
I sometimes wonder, if I’d used these knobs and color scheme, and given this pedal a name that was somewhat Dumble-ish, and swore that I’d based the tone of this pedal on the very same $100,000 Dumble custom amp used by the guy who’d played that slick solo on that dad-rock yacht jam from the late 70s along with jazz fusion bullshit that sounds like an elevator music…how many would we have sold?