There are not shortage of multi-effects pedals for guitar but this new one from Catalinbread really is something a little different, drawing inspiration from the obsolete Alesis Bitrman to design a pedal that offers distortion, phaser and plus a third user-selected effect chosen from bitcrusher, decimator, frequency modulation and ring modulation.
There is also a Mix control for dialling in your wet/dry blend, and the sense that this is a guitar effects pedal like no other, precisely because it was inspired by a unit that was marketed to DJs and “table-top musicians”.
“Our Bitters distills the madness of this circuit, fixing up the original’s shortcomings and trimming the fat to deliver an infinitely more usable version,” says Catalinbread. “Occupying the darkest corner of the soundscaping realm, the Bitters will give you lush, usable effects or completely render your signal into a puddle of digital mess.”
As with the original, it is not just for guitar. It can be integrated with your DAW, or used to process drum machines and synthesizers. It’ll work just fine with bass guitar.
The signs were there that Catalinbread would one day take a pass at refining the Bitrman format and updating it for today’s player.
In July 2020, writing on the Catalinbread site, chief designer Nicholas Kula described the Bitrman as “my favorite Alesis product of this or any other era,” noting that the Bit Reduction effect was the reason he wanted the unit in the first place.
There was a sense from Kula’s column that the Bitrman held great potential for guitar that was not realised in the original design. Also, some of the Bitrman’s sounds had never been replicated by a pedal company before.
Well, here we are now, in 2024, and the Catalinbread Bitters is absolutely an electric guitar-friendly pedal – a compact, pedalboard-friendly one at that.
There are four knobs on the enclosure. Distort dials in a “tastefully appointed and harmonically-rich digital distortion” and if you keep it fully counterclockwise it is taken right out of the signal path. The Dual dial sets the speed of a deep sine-wave phaser, with a range set from “low and syrupy to a lightning fast 20Hz”, and like the distortion, you can take it completely out of the signal by setting it at zero.
The eight-way program dial changes up the modes controlled by the Bitters dial, presenting various configurations of the bitcrusher, decimator, frequency modulation and ring modulation effects, and the signal path. Some run the four Bitters effects into the phaser then the distortion, others run the distortion into the phaser then into the Bitters effects.
As for those Bitters effects, the Decimator takes your input signal, samples it and reduces the sample rate; the Bitcrusher lowers the fidelity of the input signal, introducing digital distortion, and because that introduces noise to the circuit Catalinbread has applied a noise gate to this madness; frequency modulation is a pitch vibrato (“use the mix control to get a killer chorus sound!”); and ring modulator is just that, a bonkers sound.
Bitters is available now, priced £199/$209 street. See Catalinbread for more details.
