Almost every delay pedal ever built asks you one question: how long is the gap? You set a time, you set a feedback amount, and the box repeats what you played at that interval until it fades. It is a fundamentally simple idea, and it has been refined for sixty years into something close to perfection.
The Catalinbread Echorec asks a different question entirely. It asks: which of the four heads do you want on?
That single change — swapping “how long” for “which pattern” — is why this pedal has stayed in production for over a decade while flashier delays have come and gone, and why it turns up on the boards of players who already own three other delays and cannot bring themselves to remove it. It is not a better delay than a Strymon TimeLine or a Boss DD-3. It is barely competing with them. It is a rhythm generator that happens to be built out of echoes.
The Machine It Is Modelled On: The Binson Echorec
To understand the pedal you have to understand the very strange Italian box it descends from.
Binson began building Echorec units in Milan in the 1950s and kept going until the 1970s. Where an Echoplex used a loop of magnetic tape and a Roland Space Echo used the same principle with more heads, the Binson used something else entirely: a rotating metal platter wrapped in magnetic recording wire. A record head wrote your signal onto the drum as it spun. And then — this is the part that matters — four separate playback heads read it back at four fixed distances around the circumference.
The consequences of that layout are worth spelling out, because the whole character of the effect falls out of them.
The further a playback head sat from the record head, the longer the drum took to carry your signal round to it, and so the longer the delay. Head 4 was the furthest away and gave the longest delay the machine could produce: 300 ms. That was the ceiling, permanently, because the drum turned at one fixed speed and the heads were bolted where they were. There was no delay time knob on a Binson. There was nowhere to put one.
What Binson gave you instead was a twelve-position selector that switched combinations of those four heads in and out. One head. Two heads. Three. All four. Twelve configurations in total, each producing a different rhythmic subdivision of that same 300 ms window — because heads 1, 2 and 3 sat at even fractions of head 4’s distance. Select heads 2 and 4 and you got repeats 150 ms apart. Select all four and you got a stuttering 75 ms machine-gun pattern. Then the Swell control fed the summed output of whichever heads were active back into the record head, and the pattern regenerated on itself into a swirling, self-referencing wash that no single-tap delay can imitate.
On top of all that sat a valve audio path that flattered everything plugged into it, and which — as David Gilmour demonstrated repeatedly — reacted gorgeously to a fuzz pedal shoved in front of it. The Binson was as much a preamp as an echo, a fact that will matter a great deal further down this page.
The catch was that these were fragile, expensive, maintenance-hungry electro-mechanical machines that broke down constantly. Catalinbread’s own manual puts it bluntly: they were “notorious for breaking down or at the very least needing constant TLC.” A working original today is a collector’s item with a service schedule.
How Catalinbread Approached the Rebuild
Catalinbread have one house design philosophy and they have followed it since the company started on Nic Harris’s kitchen table in Seattle in 2003: model a named vintage machine, not a category. Their Topanga models a Fender 6G15 reverb unit. Their Belle Epoch models a Maestro Echoplex EP-3. The Echorec models a Binson Echorec, and the company’s approach to getting there was not subtle.
Rather than work from schematics and YouTube clips, Catalinbread bought an original valve unit outright. It needed a complete overhaul before it would even run. Once it was working and they had lived with it, they still were not confident enough, so they borrowed a second, known-good Echorec from a friend to check their findings against. Two functional reference machines, and then, in their own words, “years in the making.” The end result was a circuit they considered close enough to the source that they went and trademarked the name Echorec for the pedal.
Premier Guitar’s Charles Saufley reviewed it on 7 August 2013 at a street price of $230, and it went on to take a Premier Guitar Gear Award for 2013. As of 2026 it sells direct from Catalinbread for $239.99 — a ten-dollar increase across thirteen years, which is close to the most stable pricing in the boutique pedal business.
The One Thing They Changed — and Why It Changed Everything
Catalinbread did not set out to clone the Binson exactly. They set out to fix the one thing about it that had frustrated everybody who ever used one.
Their reasoning, laid out in the manual, is worth following. All twelve head combinations on a real Binson produce rhythmic patterns — but because every one of them lives inside a 300 ms ceiling, all of those patterns land in slapback territory. You can hear the syncopation, but you cannot play off it, because the subdivisions are too fast to be musical time. The rhythmic potential the four-head design implies is right there and permanently out of reach.
So Catalinbread gave the pedal a Delay Time knob — roughly 40 ms to 1000 ms — while keeping the heads locked at their even fractions of head 4. Set the pedal to maximum and head 4 lands at 1000 ms, head 3 at 750 ms, head 2 at 500 ms and head 1 at 250 ms. The pattern is preserved; the tempo is now yours. Suddenly selecting heads 1, 3 and 4 does not give you a smear — it gives you a repeating figure with a rest in it, at a tempo you can actually write a riff around.
Catalinbread describe that pattern as P 1 x 3 4, where P is your pick attack, the numbers are the active heads, and x is the silence where head 2 would have been. That is a drum pattern. It is not a delay setting.
Three of the twelve programs — 7, 10 and 11 — were effectively unusable on the original because of the fixed disc speed, and are genuinely new territory on the Catalinbread.
There is one further honesty point that Catalinbread themselves raise, and it is the sort of thing manufacturers usually leave out of their own marketing copy. The most famous Binson part in rock — the pulsing bass figure on Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” — uses a single-tap setting, head 4 only, at 300 ms with a few repeats. As Catalinbread put it in the manual, “really, you could play that part with any old delay pedal.” A company selling a multi-head echo, telling you in the manual that the most famous multi-head echo recording did not use the multi-head function, is a level of candour worth noting.
Specifications
The Preamp Is Half the Pedal
If you take one technical idea away from this article, take this one, because it is the thing most buyers miss and the thing every long-term owner ends up talking about.
Catalinbread’s stated view is that what the Binson did to your overall guitar tone and response mattered as much as the echo itself. So rather than use a standard delay driver chip, they built a discrete two-transistor preamp tuned for large clean headroom and maximum touch sensitivity, and they left buffers out of the audio path entirely. Their argument: buffers and conventional delay drivers behave like mild limiters, flattening the difference between a soft pick attack and a hard one.
The result is a delay pedal that behaves like a dynamics device. Play quietly and it shimmers; dig in and the output jumps and hits the front of your amp harder. Your dry signal never enters the converters — the preamp drives both the direct path and the digital delay line, and the two are mixed passively, without buffering, specifically so the wet and dry sound like one integrated event rather than two stacked ones.
That design decision has a side effect the manual is upfront about: because the Mix control is a true blend rather than a wet-added-to-constant-dry arrangement, your dry level drops slightly as you bring the Mix up. Catalinbread’s fix is to set the internal Gain trimpot with the Mix knob already parked where you intend to use it. That is an unusual instruction to find in a pedal manual and it tells you how seriously they took the blend.
It also puts the Echorec in the same conceptual family as the Belle Epoch, whose discrete EP-3-style preamp stays in circuit in trails mode, and as the Xotic EP Booster, which is nothing but an Echoplex preamp with a footswitch. Three products, one idea: the tone stage inside a vintage echo unit was never incidental.
The Easter Egg: Super Secret Fuzz Boost Mode
The Gain trimpot ships at unity and can be dialled up for a clean boost. Turn it all the way, however, and the preamp goes somewhere else entirely. Catalinbread call it Super Secret Fuzz Boost Mode, and their own documentation cheerfully warns that if you find it by accident “we’ll bet you probably wet your pants.”
It is a genuinely loud, genuinely fuzzy boost. Into a clean, high-headroom amp it sounds splatty and unruly. Into something already overdriven — Catalinbread suggest one of their own Foundation drives, or a cranked non-master-volume amp — it becomes an echo-and-fuzz lead cannon. The pedal gets noisy in this mode and may pick up radio when you roll your guitar volume down.
The practical advice buried in the manual is better than the party trick: set the trimpot just shy of the point where the amplification factor suddenly leaps. There you get maximum boost while keeping the best guitar-volume-knob response and the best touch sensitivity. That is the setting most owners should actually live at.
The Controls, One by One
Program Select
The twelve-position rotary that runs the whole pedal. Program 1 is a single tap; Program 12 engages all four heads. Everything in between is a different rhythmic signature. The manual’s own tip for learning it is the right one: mute the strings, rake them once, and flip through the programs listening to the pulse rather than trying to hear “delay.”
Charles Saufley’s Premier Guitar review flagged the one real ergonomic complaint about this control, and it remains valid: the pot has no detents that click into position, and the legend printed on the enclosure is small. On a dark stage, adjacent programs with very different rhythmic characters are easy to land on by mistake. Catalinbread ship a reference card with the program matrix, which helps at home and not at all in a blackout at a club.
Swell
Feedback, but not quite. Fully counter-clockwise gives you one pass — meaning one to four repeats depending on how many heads are active, which is already unusual. As you turn it up, Swell regenerates the sum of every active head back into the input, which is why the density builds so much faster and more strangely than on a single-tap delay. Somewhere between 1 o’clock and 3 o’clock there is a zone where the repeats neither die away nor take off — a sustaining ambient bed. Past that it self-oscillates for spaceship noise. Catalinbread’s own description of the decay is that the repeats “float off over the horizon rather than falling off into distorted echoes.”
Tone
A tilt EQ acting on the repeats only. Noon is roughly flat. Counter-clockwise gives darker, thicker repeats that sit behind your playing — mild burnishing at first, then deep and murky. Clockwise gives brighter, thinner repeats that emphasise pick attack, which is exactly what you want when you are trying to play against the syncopated head patterns rather than float over them.
Saufley’s observation in the PG review is worth stealing: treble-heavy settings pull out overtones and oscillation harmonics that sound like standing close to a large church bell. He also noted that he preferred running the internal modulation trimpot fairly deep and then fine-tuning the character with the Tone knob rather than the other way round.
Delay Time
40 ms to 1000 ms, and — importantly — the pedal keeps echoing while you turn it. Many modern delays mute or glitch during a time change. This one gives you speeding-up and slowing-down warp effects, which is the behaviour of a real tape or drum machine and half the fun of owning it.
Mix
Fully dry to fully wet, passive. Fully wet is genuinely useful for wet/dry rigs and stereo amp setups. Note the interaction with the bypass switch: in buffered/trails mode the Mix knob remains live when the pedal is bypassed, so an existing self-oscillating trail keeps running after you stomp off, though no new signal is echoed. In true bypass mode the Mix knob does nothing when bypassed.
Internal Controls
Three of them, under the backplate. The bypass switch selects trails/buffered (factory default) or true bypass. The gain trimpot covers unity through boost to SSFBM. The modulation trimpot, top left of the board, sets the depth of the warble that simulates the rotating drum; it ships at 1.00–1.1 V DC, which Catalinbread describe as the point where you get “a circular illusion of the recording drum without getting too cartoon-like.” The range is deliberately narrow. If you get lost you can restore factory spec with a multimeter.
Standard warning, repeated here because it is repeated in the manual: use a #00 Phillips, seat the tip properly, turn in eighth-turns, and do not force a trimpot that has stopped moving.
Famous Players — Independently Verified
House rule on this site: a player counts when a dated, published source puts the specific pedal in the specific rig, in body copy, next to photographed gear. Marketing pages and aggregator listings do not clear that bar. On this SKU the bar was met twice, cleanly, by two players whose music could hardly be less alike.
Chris Buck (Cardinal Black)
The Welsh blues-rock player’s Premier Guitar Rig Rundown, filmed by John Bohlinger at Nashville’s Basement East and published 31 July 2024, documents a double-tiered board built for his first US shows. The Echorec is named explicitly, and where it sits is the interesting part: Buck’s chain runs through a wall of drive and dynamics — a Dunlop Cry Baby, his signature ThorpyFX Electric Lightning, 29 Pedals EUNA, three Mythos boxes, a Snouse BlackBox Overdrive 2, a Great Eastern FX Small Speaker Overdrive, an Analog Man King of Tone, an Origin Effects Cali76, a Universal Audio Golden Reverberator and a Keeley Katana — and then reaches the modulation section, where a Mooer Trelicopter is followed immediately by the Echorec.
What follows the Echorec is the giveaway. A Line 6 HX Stomp XL handles “more delay and reverb sounds, plus some chorus,” then a Universal Audio Starlight Echo Station, then a Boss RE-202 Space Echo. Buck is carrying four time-based units, and the Echorec is not the workhorse among them — it is the one that does the thing the other three cannot. A GigRig G3 does the switching, and it all sits on a pair of Schmidt Array boards. Guitars: his goldtop Yamaha Revstar built by Yamaha’s Calabasas custom shop, a Springer Firehawk, and a loaner 1958 Les Paul Junior Double Cut Reissue from Gibson’s Mark Agnesi. Amps: a Victory V40 Deluxe run dual-mono with a Fender Deluxe Reverb modded and loaned by Mythos Pedals’ Zach Broyles.
Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas)
Premier Guitar’s Black Pumas Rundown, filmed by Chris Kies before the band’s second headlining night at the Ryman Auditorium and published 18 April 2024, gives us the single most useful sentence anyone has written about how this pedal is actually used. Quesada carries two delays, and PG spell out the division of labour: a Line 6 Echo Park “used for its tap tempo function,” and a Catalinbread Echorec “for longer, dreamier repeats.”
That is the Echorec’s job description in six words, and it is the same job Chris Buck gives it. The pedal without tap tempo is not the pedal you use for tempo-locked delay. It is the one you use for the sound the tempo-locked delay cannot make.
The rest of Quesada’s board is a study in soul-adjacent texture: a Strymon Flint doing the tremolo and reverb heavy lifting, an EHX Holy Grail for spring, a Boss GE-7 matching output levels between three guitars, an EarthQuaker Devices Park Fuzz, a Fulltone Clyde Wah Deluxe, a Jam Pedals Ripple, and a TC Electronic PolyTune 2 Noir. Note the Catalinbread pairing: a Belle Epoch sits on the same board, used as a preamp and buffer, and it replaced an Xotic EP Booster because Quesada wanted the second knob for finer contouring. A second board bypasses the amp entirely to recreate a guitar-into-console sound for the PA, running a JHS 3 Series Delay, a JHS Crayon and an EHX Nano POG.
Quesada plays a Fender Custom Shop one-off Telecaster built to match his tones on the Black Pumas debut, a Gibson ES-345 loaner, and a Custom Shop thinline Jazzmaster with a tremolo circuit where the rhythm circuit should be. He told PG in 2022: “I love everything with tremolo. I put tremolo on everything.” Amp: a Fender Limited Edition Electric Blue ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb with an Electro-Voice SRO alnico 12.
What We Could Not Verify This Round
Search results also surface the Echorec in connection with Torche’s Jonathan Nuñez, Whores’ Christian Lembach, and Arielle, all via Premier Guitar Rig Rundowns. Those are credible sources and the pedal may well be on all three boards, but we did not fetch and read those articles in full this time, and this site does not credit a player on the strength of a search snippet. Treat them as likely, not confirmed.
The Lineage, Stated Honestly
The players whose names sell this pedal never touched it. David Gilmour and Syd Barrett built the Binson’s reputation — Gilmour by making it a front-and-centre voice in Pink Floyd, Barrett by using its convoluted multi-head repeats as raw material for British psychedelia. Catalinbread’s own marketing leans on Live at Pompeii. The manual also names Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips among Binson devotees.
All of those are Binson credits, not Catalinbread credits, and the distinction matters. The same applies to the broader multi-head echo tradition that runs through Jimmy Page, The Edge, Andy Summers and Nels Cline — these are ancestors of the sound this pedal makes, not owners of it. When you read “as used by Gilmour” on a retailer page, what is being described is the machine from 1963, not the box from 2013.
Tone Recipes and Settings
1. Pompeii Wash
Program: 12 (all four heads) · Delay Time: 9 o’clock (short) · Swell: 2 o’clock · Tone: 11 o’clock · Mix: 1 o’clock
The densest configuration at short delay times becomes a regenerating cloud rather than a set of repeats. Saufley noted this in the PG review — at Program 12 the wash is rich enough with overtones and ghost oscillations that it very nearly removes the need for a reverb. Let chords ring and overlap; the pedal responds by smearing them into one another. Put a fuzz in front for the full Floyd treatment; Catalinbread explicitly designed the input to take fuzz well.
2. The Rhythmic Riff Machine
Program: 7, 10 or 11 · Delay Time: 2 o’clock (long) · Swell: 9 o’clock · Tone: 2 o’clock · Mix: noon
These are the three programs the original Binson could not usefully produce. Long delay time to make the subdivisions musical, low Swell so the pattern stays legible, bright Tone to keep the pick attack cutting through. Play palm-muted staccato single notes and let the pedal supply the rest of the bar. This is the setting the pedal exists for.
3. Dimensional Fifties Slapback
Program: 2 or 3 · Delay Time: 8–9 o’clock · Swell: fully counter-clockwise · Tone: 10 o’clock · Mix: 10 o’clock
Two or three heads at very short times gives you a slapback with more internal complexity than any single-tap delay can produce — the repeats arrive as a cluster rather than a single bounce. Darker Tone keeps it behind the note. Compare with a Boss DM-2W set to a similar time and the difference is immediate.
4. Ambient Pad That Never Dies
Program: 9 to 12 · Delay Time: noon · Swell: 1–3 o’clock (find the balance point) · Tone: 9 o’clock · Mix: 2 o’clock
The Swell zone between roughly 1 and 3 o’clock is where the regeneration neither runs away nor decays. Catalinbread flag this specifically. Dark Tone stops it turning into a treble mess as it builds. Play legato arpeggios and the pedal produces a self-sustaining bed you can solo over. Run at 9 V rather than 18 V for this one — Catalinbread say 9 V is better for “ambient soup” because the notes swirl together more.
5. Epic Lead Boost
Internal switch: true bypass · Gain trimpot: boosted, or full for SSFBM · Program: 4 · Delay Time: 11 o’clock · Swell: 11 o’clock · Mix: 11 o’clock
Catalinbread’s own recommended lead configuration, and it is a good one. Place the Echorec before your main overdrive or before an overdriven amp. Stepping on it delivers echo and a substantial level jump simultaneously, and the amp responds by getting bigger rather than just louder. You can still get quiet passages by rolling back your guitar volume — the preamp tracks it beautifully.
6. Warp Landing
Program: 1 · Swell: 3+ o’clock (into oscillation) · Tone: sweep by hand · Mix: 1 o’clock
Push Swell into self-oscillation and then turn the Delay Time knob in real time. The pitch of the oscillating tail drags with it, up and down. Sweeping Tone clockwise at the same time produces a siren; counter-clockwise makes the repeats “slowly bubble to the surface, like a behemoth rising from the deep,” in Catalinbread’s phrase. Not subtle, and not for every gig.
Playing Technique Is a Control
The manual spends more space on technique than on the knobs, and it is right to. The Echorec is designed to respond across two axes at any single setting: legato to staccato, and pianissimo to fortissimo. Palm-mute and pick percussively and you hear the syncopated head pattern; let notes ring and overlap on the same setting and you hear ambient swirl. Play softly and it shimmers; hit it hard and it jumps. You change the effect without touching the pedal. That is genuinely rare, and it is the reason the manual insists on describing the box as a musical instrument rather than a processor.
All positions are clock references. Start with the internal switch in trails mode and the gain trimpot at factory unity unless stated.
Where It Goes in the Chain
The default position is at or near the end of the board. After dirt gives more separation between repeats and a more open sound. Before dirt wraps the repeats and dry signal together, because the drive is compressing them as one event.
But the Echorec’s preamp complicates the standard advice, and this is the part worth reading twice. Do not put buffered pedals between your guitar and the Echorec. The touch sensitivity that the whole design is built around depends on your pickups feeding the preamp directly. Other pedals in front are fine as long as they are true bypass, so that switching them off restores the direct path. Catalinbread single out buffered tuners placed first in the chain — a TU-2, for example — as the classic mistake.
Fuzzes and treble boosters generally belong before the Echorec. Catalinbread say they made a point of getting that interaction right, and specifically flag it as the route to the Pompeii sound.
Placing the Echorec before a touch-sensitive overdrive preserves and even extends that pedal’s dynamic range, and in front of an overdriven non-master-volume amp it lets you move from clean to crunch on pick attack alone.
Comparisons
Versus the Catalinbread Belle Epoch
These are stablemates and they are not interchangeable. The Belle Epoch models the Maestro EP-3 — a single-head tape unit with random wow and flutter, and a preamp that half the appeal rests on. The Echorec models the Binson — four heads, no tape, warble that simulates a spinning drum rather than a stretching tape. Belle Epoch is the better ordinary delay and the better slapback. Echorec is the better rhythm generator and the better ambient machine. Adrian Quesada’s board is the practical answer: he carries both, doing different jobs.
Versus tape echo emulations
The Strymon El Capistan and Volante and the Boss RE-2 are all modelling tape machines, and the Volante notably includes a drum-echo mode alongside its tape and studio modes. Those are far more flexible boxes with presets, tap tempo and stereo. The Echorec has none of that. What it has is a preamp in the dry path and a mix stage designed around feel, which is a completely different priority. If you want the full sound-design toolkit, buy the Strymon. If you want one particular thing to happen when you hit a string, buy this.
Versus multi-head Space Echo emulations
The Boss RE-202 also gives you selectable head combinations, and it is a much more complete pedal — twelve modes, stereo, MIDI, tap tempo, spring reverb. The distinction is that the Space Echo’s heads are read from a tape loop at a variable speed, while the Binson’s four heads are read from a fixed-speed drum, and the resulting rhythmic relationships are different. The RE-202 also compresses and limits your dynamics the way a good tape machine does. The Echorec pointedly does not.
Versus the ordinary delay on your board
An MXR Carbon Copy, a TC Flashback 2 or a Boss DD-8 will do everything the Echorec does at Program 1 and a great deal it cannot do at all — tap tempo above everything. Note what both verified Echorec users did: they kept a conventional delay for tempo work and added the Echorec alongside it. That is the honest recommendation. This is not a first delay.
Buying Guide
Who should buy one
- Players who want the delay to generate rhythmic ideas rather than repeat them
- Ambient and post-rock players who need a wash that reverb cannot produce
- Anyone chasing the Binson end of the Pink Floyd sound, particularly with a fuzz in front
- Players who value pick dynamics and dislike what most delays do to their touch
- Anyone who wants a delay that doubles as a serious boost or fuzz booster
Who should not
- Anyone who needs tap tempo — there is none, and no expression input either
- Anyone who needs presets, MIDI or stereo
- Players whose repertoire requires fast, blind program changes on a dark stage
- Anyone who only wants a clean, transparent, get-out-of-the-way delay; Saufley’s stated con in the PG review was precisely that simpler conventional sounds are harder to dial in here
- Boards running exclusively on a 9 V, low-current supply with nothing spare
Practical purchase notes
Power first. 9 to 18 V DC, negative ground, minimum 70 mA, and no battery option at all. Budget for a proper isolated supply output. Try it at both voltages before you settle: Catalinbread state that 9 V favours ambient blending while 18 V gives more headroom, more level and more separation between repeats — better for playing off the rhythmic programs.
Check the internal switch on a used unit. The pedal ships in trails mode, but the previous owner may have flipped it to true bypass and dialled the gain trimpot up for a lead boost. If a second-hand Echorec sounds unexpectedly loud or fuzzy when engaged, that is almost certainly what happened, and it is a two-minute fix rather than a fault.
Beware the naming collision. “Echorec” refers to the 1950s–70s Binson machine, to Catalinbread’s trademarked pedal, and loosely to several other drum-echo emulations. Vintage Binson listings are four-figure items requiring service; this is a $239.99 stompbox. Read listings carefully.
Ask whether the reference card is included. Catalinbread supply a printed matrix of the twelve program configurations. It is genuinely useful given how small the legend on the enclosure is, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets lost before resale.
Living With It
Three things owners consistently report, all of which trace back to design decisions covered above.
The first is the program knob. It has no detents. In a dim room you will land on the wrong program at some point. The workaround most players settle on is to pick two or three programs, learn where they sit by feel relative to the endstops, and treat the rest as studio territory.
The second is that the Echorec has a strong personality and does not always share nicely. It colours, it warbles, it has a preamp permanently in your dry path in trails mode. Reviewers have described it as something that can bully the pedals around it. That is not a defect — it is what you are paying for — but it means the Echorec tends to define the board it sits on rather than blend into it.
The third is that this is a set-and-explore pedal rather than a set-and-forget one. There are no presets to return to. If you find something extraordinary, write the five knob positions down.
On the reliability side: Catalinbread build in Portland, Oregon, hand-assemble one at a time, use lead-free RoHS-compliant solder, and back everything with a three-year warranty. The pedal has been in continuous production since 2013, which in boutique terms is a very long run and means parts and service are not an issue.
One historical note belongs here, stated plainly and left alone. Nicholas Harris, who founded Catalinbread in 2003 and drove the Echorec project, was killed on 9 March 2016, aged 37, when a wind-felled tree struck his car on U.S. 26 in Portland. The obituaries that followed — in Vintage Guitar, MusicRadar, Reverb News and Willamette Week — reached with striking consistency for the same two pedals to explain what he had built: the Echorec and the Belle Epoch. The company was bought in March 2020 by Kyle Sears and Brandon Rush, Pacific Northwest musicians and studio owners who committed to keeping it hand-built and locally run. It still is.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Catalinbread Echorec have tap tempo?
No. There is no tap tempo, no expression input and no MIDI. Delay time is set by the knob only, though you can turn that knob while the pedal is running for pitch-bending warp effects. Both verified users on this page carry a second, conventional delay specifically for tempo-locked work.
What do the twelve programs actually do?
They select which of the four virtual playback heads are active. Program 1 is a single tap; Program 12 engages all four. The ten positions in between are different combinations, each producing a distinct rhythmic pattern within the delay time you have set. Programs 7, 10 and 11 are configurations the original Binson could not usefully produce because of its fixed drum speed.
Can I run it on a battery?
No — Catalinbread say so explicitly and in capital letters. It needs 9 to 18 V DC, negative ground, from a supply capable of at least 70 mA.
Should I run 9 V or 18 V?
Both are officially supported and Catalinbread recommend trying both. 9 V favours ambient, blended textures where notes swirl together. 18 V gives more headroom, more output and better separation between repeats, which suits playing off the syncopated programs. Neither is more “correct.”
Why does my Echorec sound louder or fuzzier than expected?
Almost certainly the internal gain trimpot. It ships at unity, but turned fully up it enters Catalinbread’s Super Secret Fuzz Boost Mode — an intentional easter egg, not a fault. On a used pedal, check the trimpot and the internal bypass switch before assuming anything is wrong.
Is it true bypass?
It ships in buffered “trails” mode, which keeps the preamp in your signal path at all times and lets existing repeats decay naturally after you switch off. An internal switch converts it to hard-wire true bypass. Catalinbread recommend trails mode for most players, and true bypass mainly for those using the gain trimpot as a footswitchable boost.
Where should it go on my pedalboard?
Near the end of the chain for the most open sound, but with one firm constraint: do not place buffered pedals between your guitar and the Echorec, because the pedal’s touch sensitivity depends on receiving your pickups directly. Buffered tuners first in the chain are the usual culprit. Fuzzes and treble boosters go before it.
Did David Gilmour use this pedal?
No. Gilmour used original Binson Echorec machines, which is what the Catalinbread models. The 1963 machine and the 2013 pedal are separate products and the credit belongs to the former. The verified users of the Catalinbread pedal documented on this page are Chris Buck and Adrian Quesada.
The Verdict Nobody Asked For
The Echorec is one of the few delay pedals that is genuinely a different instrument rather than a different flavour. Everything about it follows from the decision to keep the Binson’s four fixed heads and add the one control the original could never have — and then to build a preamp underneath that treats your pick attack as the primary input rather than a nuisance to be levelled out.
It has no tap tempo, no presets, no stereo, and a program knob you cannot find in the dark. It has been essentially unchanged for thirteen years and costs ten dollars more than it did in 2013. Neither of the two players we could verify uses it as their main delay, and both of them keep it anyway, for the same reason: it produces something the other four boxes on the board cannot.
That is a narrow recommendation and an unusually confident one. Buy it second, not first — and then find out how much of your next riff it writes for you.