Inspired by big and warm tube-driven echoes, Catalinbread Montavillian is an ambient delay that addresses some of the shortcomings of other echo pedals, while maintaining its own unique sonic footprint. Here are some of the standout features of the unit:
Headroom and stacking abilities: The Montavillian is designed to have a lot of headroom at 9V, but should you run out, the unit operates at 18V to really take care of business.
Cut Control: The Cut is actually a lowpass filter, with a knee that sweeps from 400 to 1500Hz, allowing you some control over the tone of the echo.
Loud Repeats and Self Oscillation: The Mix control is at unity when set halfway (when running at 9V), which leaves you a lot of room to boost the level of the repeats over the dry signal. This can be useful for creating some self-oscillation chaos, which the ‘villian is designed to do with ease. The unit self-oscillates with fairly low settings on the repeat knob. and the cut control is helpful in determining just how piercing the meltdown will be.
The Montavillian provides some nice long spacey delays, with some interesting features to boot. Check out Catalinbread’s demo video below, or for some longer samples with different knob settings (and some woodsy backdrops) check out this video by musictoyz.com.
Here’s a reissue with new graphics the Portland company did in 2021 for Chicago Music Exchange. – Mike Bauer
Spoiled by the various tube driven echo units Catalinbread has around their shop, they wanted the Montavillian Echo to sound and feel just as BIG! So they went all out on the audio path on this thing… They took painstaking efforts to make the dry signal sound and feel better when on, than with the pedal bypassed.
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, Catalinbread threw it out and ventured out on their own, using their ears to guide them, and what they achieved is a fantastic sounding delay, with a slew of sounds in a small, easy-to-use footprint.
Features
- Huge tube echo sound
- Utilizes a PT2399 chip
- Wide variety of sounds
- Small footprint
