It has been a banner week at Wampler Pedals with the launch of not one but two pedals, the Catacombs delay/reverb twofer, and Syntax, a mini-pedal that’s designed to make your life easier, giving you greater control over your rig.
When it gets down to it, both the Catacombs and Syntax are designed to make a player’s pedalboard life easier. They just approach it from different points.
The Syntax is what you might call a utility pedal, not as glamorous as a multi-featured reverb pedal but nonetheless with the potential to be a life-saver, particularly for those with lots of different things happening on their ‘board at once.
Catacombs, meanwhile, is like a greatest hits of delay and reverb, packing 11 classic sounds into one housing, digitally powered with the capacity to program the unit and save your favourite sounds down with a minimum of fuss, no deep-dives into the manual or menu scrolling required.
In short, Brian Wampler designed this pedal to make his own gigging life easier, and he hopes it will make your gigging life easier, too.
As he says in the video below, he designed this for himself, and at first wasn't sure if he was going to release it or not – and that might sound remarkable, far-fetched, but Wampler once told MusicRadar that he will often sit on a Saturday night and build a circuit just for fun.
“One challenge kept coming up, both for me and the countless musicians I've talked to: the struggle to have a wide range of sounds with complex editing capabilities while keeping the pedal interface manageable,” he says. “We either compromise on versatility or sacrifice precious space. I knew there had to be a better way. That’s why I created the Catacombs – a pedal that eliminates the compromise altogether. It packs 11 of the most popular delay and reverb sounds into one intuitive, powerful package.”
Catacombs has six different delays and five reverbs, and you can run one of each simultaneously with the other, saving them down into one of eight presets. All of these programmed settings can then be controlled by tap tempo – and you can run them in mono and stereo, in parallel or in series.
Hook it up with MIDI and you can access (and control) 128 presets, and there is an input for a user-assignable expression pedal to control any or multiple parameters.
The delay modes comprise analogue, BBD, tape echo emulation, an “other-worldly” space-echo, Wampler’s Faux Tape Echo algorithm and a digital model of the ‘80s classic TC Electronic 2290 delays. The reverb modes, similarly, serve up some familiar favourites, such as hall, a “warm, vintage” plate sound, spring reverb emulation, shimmer, and a room mode that’s described as “the perfect studio reverb”.
Extending the range of this ambient powerhouse, Wampler is also offering it as a free guitar plugin for owners of the unit – you can otherwise purchase the Catacombs plugin for $49.99.
Syntax, meanwhile, is a mini-pedal that is be a dual-sided MIDI program selector, tap-tempo controller, and amp channel switcher all in one. It does all this with just two footswitches, both of which can be operated in momentary or latching modes, and are served by a pair of independent 3-way slider switches.
Set the slider to tap tempo and the corresponding footswitch works operates the tap-tempo feature on the time-based guitar effects pedal of your choice. Turn the other to MIDI and you can cycle through and change presets on the fly. Connect it to your guitar amp in latching mode and use it two change the channels.
It is no accident that Wampler launched Syntax on the same day as Catacombs, because it is designed to be part of that same effects pedal eco-system.
Syntax allows you to hook up Wampler’s digital multi-modal units such as Catacombs, Metaverse delay pedal and Terraform modulation, and use the Syntax to change presets on any or all three at the same time. All this from a pedal that measures 1.5”x3.5”x 1.5”.
Both Catacombs and Syntax are made in the USA and ship with a limited five-year warranty from Wampler. Catacombs takes 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply and draws 130mA. Syntax can be run on 9V or 18V. Catacombs is priced $/£299 street. Syntax is priced £/$99.
For more details, head over to Wampler Pedals.
