“An additive chorus effect that plays well as an ‘always-on’ tonal thickener with a twist”: Don’t sleep on Catalinbread’s Wake if you’re looking for dream pop tones on your pedalboard

Catalinbread has just launched a chorus pedal with an octave-down effect that gives you plug-in-and-play dream pop tones.

Ironically, it’s called Wake, and it was inspired by the early digital processing hardware of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s – and perhaps much of the 4AD catalogue of that time.

“The music with what feels like the entire mix bathed in digital rack choruses went by many names but eventually settled on the name ‘dream pop,’” says Catalinbread. “While the term shares origins with shoegaze, it is one meant to convey atmospherics in equal measure with the melodic hooks and moods commonly associated with pop music.”

This should have some crossover appeal, for those looking to sound like the Cocteau Twins and the Cure at their most psychedelic, to the shoegaze player, and the post-rock, post-metal artist who wants to expand their tone and give it a three-dimensional width.

Catalinbread Wake Chorus - YouTube

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Recent times have witnessed Portland, Oregon guitar effects pedals specialist releasing a number of stompboxes designed for the shoegaze player.

In 2022, there was the Soft Focus Reverb, which offered the sounds of the Yamaha FX500 rack unit – and in turn the hypnotic electric guitar tones of Slowdive – in a compact stompbox, then this was expanded with a Deluxe edition, complete with an emulation of the delay function from the original FX500.

Another shoegaze-adjacent option arrived via the Sinkhole modulated reverb pedal, which could apply comb filtering, phaser pedal movement and quote/unquote “haunting auto-filtering” to your reverb tails.

Catalinbread Wake Chorus Snippet #2 - YouTube

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Wake sits well in this company. Sometimes modulation can add a little too much movement, but Catalinbread says Wake’s eight-voice chorus is engineered to play with the other pedals in your signal chain, enhancing dynamics.

As for the controls, we’ve got a familiar Catalinbread enclosure, four knobs, an all-important Mix control selects how much of the chorusing effect is in your signal, offering pitch-shifting vibrato at its most extreme settings. Rate controls the speed of the modulation – set it low for those gauzy twilight atmospheres and speed things up for a punchier sound.

Depth does what it says it does (Catalinbread promises note clarity even at extreme settings), and Octave dials in the “whistle-clean” octave-down effect, which runs in parallel to the chorus.

The Octave and Mix dials are in cahoots; turn them together to find the speed spot for fattening up your sound. Catalinbread says so much; chorus is often an effect, but this can also be a sound that serves a practical purpose. An always-on chorus? Stranger things have happened.

You can run the Wake on 9V or 18V DC from a pedalboard power supply. It is available now, priced £179/$199 street. Check it out at Catalinbread.