There’s no pussyfooting around for new company KittycasterFX as it hits the ground running with a pair of serious tone-shapers
KITTYCASTERFX TREMDRIVER & GROOVY WIZARD $399 & $299
CONTACT KittycasterFX WEB www.kittycasterfx.com
What You Need To Know
1 KittycasterFX? Never heard of them…
While you may not have heard of this new company, which only formed in April of this year, Catalinbread is likely to be a familiar name. And these pedals are the brainchild of Howard Gee, former Catalinbread pedal designer.
2 What makes these different?
Howard’s idea here was to make the most responsive guitar pedal ever. He says that these are designed to bring out every nuance of your playing and to make your rig sound bigger and more dynamic.
3 Only two pedals?
So far, but both have plenty packed into them. The Tremdriver offers an Echoplex-style preamp plus Harmonic tremolo, while the Groovy Wizard’s powers range from boost to full-on fuzz.
If Howard Gee’s cat hadn’t walked past his Strat just as he was trying to think up a name, this pedal company may never have been called Kittycaster! These hand-built pedals have a distinctive look to match, too, with a pretty damn solid wedgeshaped, two-part sheet aluminium chassis and psychedelic-style graphics. All of the connections are on the front, so the pedals sit snugly side by side. With that sloping surface a whole array of them would look really good, but we may have to wait a while for more models to be added to the range. The pedals sit on four rubber feet that can be easily undone with your fingers to get the two chassis sections apart and that can be replaced with the supplied countersunk screws for a flush base if you want to add them to your ’board using Velcro.
Tremdriver Preamp/ Harmonic Tremolo
The intent of the Tremdriver preamp is to make everything sound bigger, wider and punchier. Basically, it’s a high-headroom preamp that runs from a standard nine-volt supply but internally converts it to 24 volts. If you’re familiar with the properties of the EP-3 Echoplex preamp, this is it writ large: where the EP-3 featured a single preamp JFET stage, here you get three discrete JFET preamp stages in a series/ parallel configuration. Your guitar signal hits the single first stage and then the Drive control splits out the signal to two parallel JFET preamp stages that are voiced treble and bass. Besides the preamp you also get harmonic tremolo from the pedal, kicked in with the LFO footswitch. When this is engaged the signal starts panning between the treble and bass JFET stages to give you harmonic tremolo sound.
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