Catalinbread Talisman Plate Reverb

IDESCRIPTION

Peerless Music is proud to be an authorised Australian dealer for Catalainbread. Catalinbread designs and hand-builds, high quality, industry defining, guitar effects pedals in the U.S.A..

TALISMAN PLATE REVERB

Era-defining plate reverb with studio-style controls. 479.99% smaller than the leading plate reverb. It adds lush ambience, dimension, thickness, and depth in an unobtrusive way.

Listen to any recording from the 70’s and you’ll most likely hear the sound of a plate reverb, a giant mechanical contraption roughly the size of a king size bed. It was ubiquitous in the studio, and was the only reverb used on Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon album for example. What made plate reverb so cool? It adds lush ambience, dimension, thickness, and depth in an unobtrusive way. When you listen to your favorite albums from the 70s you probably don’t even realize how much plate reverb you are hearing. Go back and listen and hone in on the reverb sound and you’ll probably be surprised how much reverb is actually there. In the studio the plate reverb signal was often processed on the way back to the console where the things like filtering and delays were applied.

The Catalinbread Talisman was designed to emulate the legendary (and gigantic!) EMT 140 plate reverb unit introduced in the late 1950’s. In use for decades now in studios around the world, it has become an industry standard and has been used on some of the most iconic recordings ever made.

For those not familiar, a plate reverb is essentially a very large sheet metal panel (roughly 7’ x 5’) suspended within a metal frame by heavy duty springs and encased within a large wooden box. The incoming signal hits the metal plate via a driver amplifier and transducer causing it to vibrate much like the cone of a speaker does. Pickups placed around the plate sense the vibration and the signal is then sent to an output amplifier to boost the signal. Sliding damper pads inside the box are adjusted to determine the length of decay. It’s a brilliantly simple design. The result is an incredibly lush and natural sounding reverb that never seems to get in the way of the source signal – it just embellishes it and creates the illusion of space.

The Talisman provides the same lush dimension to your sound – subtly creating space around your playing at minimum settings to seemingly endless waves of ambient shimmering reflections at the extremes. Drawing sonic inspiration from classic albums of the 70’s such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon to those incendiary first Van Halen records and literally thousands of others, the Talisman excels at replicating those quintessential plate reverb sounds. Featuring controls used in the studio models like high pass filtering and pre-delay, we’ve made it easy for guitarists to dial in that same compelling sound when using it with an amplifier.

CONTROLS IN DETAIL

The MIX control allows you to dial in the amount of effected signal from

completely dry to 100% wet.

The HIGH PASS control gradually filters out lower frequencies as it is increased. If you find the signal to be muddy, you can turn up the HIGH PASS control for increased clarity and a more detailed reverb sound.

The TIME control adjusts the length of the reverb tail from a short ‘small room’ type decay to an almost infinite pad of soupy fog. It’s possible when the pedal’s internal slider switch is set to BUFF to then bypass the pedal and play over that ‘infinite pad’ with an unaffected signal.

The PRE DELAY control adjusts the time between your dry signal and the onset of reverb reflection. AS you turn the PRE DELAY knob up, you can hear the reverb detach from the dry guitar signal up to about 100mS. If you want your guitar signal to cut through the mix more and be less obscured by the reverb tail, this is where the PRE DELAY control comes into play.

The VOL knob controls the overall output volume. When the pedal’s internal slider switch is set to BUFF mode (the Talisman ships from us in this mode – see the INTERNAL CONTROLS section below for more info), the VOL control is still active in bypass. This allows you the ability to use the Talisman as a global master volume for your entire pedalboard if you wish. The discrete preamp is also capable of a healthy amount of boost! Unity volume versus your bypassed signal (when the internal slider is set to TB mode) will occur at different settings based on whether you are powering it at 9V or 18V.

INTERNAL CONTROLS

BUFF/TB SWITCH. Located in the lower left corner of the circuit board is the slider switch that allows you to run the pedal in two different states of bypass. In BUFF mode, the reverb reflections will trail off naturally when bypassing the pedal. In this mode, the VOL and MIX controls remain active in bypass allowing you to use it as a ‘master volume’ for your entire pedalboard. In TB mode, the pedal is completely bypassed including the VOL and MIX controls.

WHERE TO PLACE YOUR TALISMAN IN YOUR EFFECT CHAIN

Time based effects typically live at the end of effect chains. Running dirt pedals and delays for example into the Talisman will allow them to remain clear and detailed. If you run reverb before dirt pedals, the result can a bit more compressed and less detailed than if you had set it up the other way around and obviously distorted as well. This can be a very cool thing! It’s fun to experiment with effects positioning and discover the relationships between them to tailor the sounds that you are searching for!

POWER SUPPLY

The Talisman can be powered by any center-negative 9-18V DC power supply that is designed for use with effect pedals and can provide at least 100mA of current. When powering multiple pedals with one supply, make sure that the current rating of the power supply is greater than the sum of all of the individual pedal’s current draws.

SPECIFICATIONS

Buffered or True Bypass switching (slider switch located inside) 4.375” (11.11 cm) x 2.375” (6 cm) x 1.875” (4.76 cm)

62mA current draw at 9V DC

66mA current draw at 18V DC

9-18V DC center-negative power supply required