“Fewer things give guitarists that fabled ‘riff face’ more than a fuzz mixed with an analog octave down”: Catalinbread’s Perseus Dio crams its two favorite octave-down styles into one face-contorting pedal
The Perseus Dio blends a guitar’s dry signal with one- and two-octave down channels, with “heavy duty” low-pass filters adding further flavor
(Image credit: Catalinbread)
Catalinbread is offering a two-for-one with its brand-new Perseus Dio octave pedal, putting their favorite two styles into one stompbox.
The pedal makers say its preferred octave-down boxes deliver either “beefy video-gamey square waves [or] clean octaves that compliment one’s tone.” But it has bemoaned the lack of a pedal that does both – which is where the Perseus Dio comes in.
It succeeds its own Perseus pedal, which gave players either a single or two-octave blend, and takes its design several steps further.
The standard-size pedal serves a three-channel trio of mix dials comprising the dry signal, and ‘Down’ controls for that same signal at both one and two octaves down. There’s also a “heavy-duty” low pass filter dial for each octave channel.
The ‘Down’ dials have reportedly been tuned to provide the best possible tracking across all positions of the fretboard.
The Filter controls, meanwhile, govern the cutoff point, with both offering a minimum of ~7KHz. Filter 1 maxes out at ~280KHz, delivering a “clean octave down with bubbling harmonics,” and Filter 2 at ~140KHZ to “really let the 'oomph' shine through at higher settings.”
A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He's also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.
