Catalinbread Montavillian Ambient Echo Pedal

The Catalinbread Montavillian is a no-frills delay with a dry audio path designed to not mess with the tone of pedals in front of it. Ever have a great fuzz or overdriven tone that became harsh and thin when you engage an echo pedal situated downstream on your pedalboard? This pedal was designed to fatten, not thin out your signal!

The Montavillian Echo utilizes the PT2399 chip, one of the more common delay chips used in modern delays, however, rather than slavishly following the datasheet, they ventured out on their own, and what was achieved is a fantastic sounding delay, with a slew of sounds in a small, easy to use footprint. It has great headroom and stacking abilities, often short comings of echo pedals.

This is an echo pedal right? So let's talk about what makes the echo parts of the Montavillian so unique. But first some backstory, In order to reduce clock and anti-aliasing noise, nearly all bucket-brigade (BBD) delays use a compander, a device originally designed to reduce noise over old telephone systems. Companders reduce the dynamic range of what goes into them and tries to expand the signal downstream. The problem is that many companded echoes have unattractive repeats, which bubble, chirp, and become messy as the repeats become quieter...The effect ruins the illusion of SPACE and ambience. The Montavillian has no companding, therefore the echoes trail off almost forever over the horizon, disappearing into the ether rather than crash landing back to earth. The… read more resulting echoes function to provide a sonic soup, a bed of ambience to play over. The illusion of depth of field, space and size that the Montavillian provides, makes it one of the few stompboxes that comes close to.

Features:

- The TIME knob allows for a wide range of delay times, ranging from around 60ms all the way up to over 600ms max time.
- The CUT knob's function is to sweep from about 400Hz to about 1500Hz, low pass filter... When the knee sweeps to the high side it gives a nice little bump in the mids right before the subtle fall off. Tuning this knob allows you to sweep from old school BBD dark filtering to a clear repeat. It gives you the power to adjust your echoes so that they sit in the mix perfectly against your dry signal. This control also functions to EQ the tonality of self-oscillations.
- The MIX knob is traditional in the way it mixes into your dry path the amount of echo. What is not traditional the amount of boost it permits you to add... So many echo pedals out there you can hardly tune the repeat to unity with the gain. This is not at all the case with the Montavillian Echo! You can make your repeats much louder than the dry signal. This comes in really handy for short repeats for a dramatic doubling effect as well as self-oscillation freak-outs.
- The REPEATS knob feeds signal from the output of the delay line to the input. This control allows for a single repeat all the way to self-oscillation. read less