Nicholas Harris started Catalinbread on his own kitchen table in June 2003 after a local shop asked to sell his Super Chili Picoso pedal, and the Semaphore Tremolo, released the following year, became the early seller that got the company noticed. Catalinbread moved from Seattle to Portland in 2006 and has hand-built its pedals there ever since, building a catalogue leaning heavily on shoegaze and dream-pop reverbs and fuzzes alongside more straightforward overdrives. Harris died in a highway accident in 2016; musicians and studio owners Kyle Sears and Brandon Rush bought the company in 2020 and have kept it running in the same Portland workshop. We cover most new Catalinbread releases as they land. Here's what we've written.
Catalinbread's Jimothy Bit Crush brings 8-bit retro arcade mayhem to your rig. Check out our full specs breakdown, FAQ, and final verdict score.
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On a kitchen table. By the company's own account it was born in 2003 on Nic Harris's kitchen table in the Pacific Northwest, and its first pedal was the Super Chili Picoso, made exclusively for ToneFactor, a Seattle guitar shop. Sales of that pedal funded the more adventurous designs that followed.
Circuits that recreate a specific rig rather than a generic effect — the Formula No. 5 and Dirty Little Secret are built around particular amplifiers, and the Belle Epoch is a solid-state take on the EP-3 tape echo. The house approach is 'this amp, this era' instead of 'an overdrive'.
Catalinbread's Echoplex EP-3 emulation. It reproduces not just the delay but the preamp colouration the EP-3 imparted even with the echo off, which is the part players actually chase. It comes in standard and Deluxe versions, the Deluxe adding more control over the tape behaviour.
Catalinbread builds in Portland, Oregon. The company grew out of the American boutique pedal scene of the early 2000s and has stayed a domestic builder rather than moving production offshore as it scaled.
