“A huge range of sounds you’d be hard-pressed to get from standard overdrive or distortion boxes.” We review the Catalinbread Crooner preamp pedal

You don’t have to be a recording wiz to get excited by the new Catalinbread Crooner (the second installment in the company’s CB-Range Discrete Console Pre series), but you should definitely recalibrate expectations a bit when plugging in.

Guitarists tend to think of preamps as simply a way to tweak EQ and decide how much grit or distortion to dial in from their amp or dirt box. But studio engineers see recording-console preamps in a much different light. Their ears perk up at the mention of hallowed designs by the likes of Neve, SSL, and API the way we get excited about, say, a Klon Centaur, Ibanez Tube Screamer, or Electro-Harmonix Big Muff.

But studio preamps like the ones just mentioned (and many others) were putting their sonic signatures on landmark recordings long before effects pedals were a thing. And not just on guitar tones. In any genre you can think of, classic recordings used rare, now-expensive preamps to imbue not just every track but the entire mix with a magic that was as key to the listener’s aural experience as the fancy microphones — and the engineers and players themselves.

That magic is often subtle — but it doesn’t have to be. After all, the mayhem-inducing sounds of a studio preamp being (ab)used in ways its designers never intended are what launched the fuzz-pedal industry in 1962. The Maestro FZ-1 let guitarists take that sound to the stage. Our sonic frontier hasn’t been the same since.

The Crooner is based on the transistor-driven guts of a 1960s RCA BA-31 microphone preamp. It feeds your electric guitar signal through an op-amp similar to those used in old UREI (Universal Audio) studio gear, such as the 1176 Peak Limiter. From the op-amp, the signal heads into the RCA-inspired, germanium-transistor section and on to the transformer-driven output stage.

Crooner is governed by four knobs, which the average guitarist may find slightly confusing: Push controls the amount of op-amp gain, trim controls the amount of germanium-produced gain in the BA-31 circuit, filter is a treble-cut control, and volume sets overall output level.

After spending hours testing the Crooner with everything from a Fender Jaguar and Telecaster to a Gibson Les Paul Special and Dunable Cyclops, I concluded it’s most versatile and alluring when paired with the type of tube amp that sounds nice the more you push it. Higher-headroom clean amps, such as a Fender with vintage-style speakers, are still viable Crooner partners. However, they’re more apt to sound like a direct-to-board track. They also tended to respond more harshly to aggressive pedal settings.

I got a wealth of tones routing Crooner through a 6973-powered Goodsell combo inspired by old Supro amps. Besides having a tube topology friendly to all sorts of drive pedals, its alnico speaker further accommodated a huge range of sounds, many of which you’d be hard-pressed to get from standard overdrive or distortion boxes.

If the above note about fuzz and studio preamps didn’t quite sink in and Crooner’s name is still hitting you with gross lounge-singer vibes, you can rest easy. Crooner serves up all kinds of gnarliness, regardless of guitar or pickup type. Simply turn the trim and push knobs past noon to go from varying flavors of Fuzz Face-like filth to the spitty, gated tones of a ZVEX Fuzz Factory.

That said, the first tones that got me giddy were the ones that turned single-coil bridge pickups into knife-fight slashers. And those came at much more moderate settings. Dialing Crooner’s volume and filter controls fully clockwise (the latter equating to no treble cut whatsoever), while keeping push at minimum and trim just before noon, turned even my Jag’s bridge unit — with vintage-spec high-pass filter engaged, no less — into a seething, swaggering mofo.

And with a generous helping of sweet compression, too. Think Kinks, Franz Ferdinand, or Strokes tones on steroids and you’ve got the idea. My Telecaster Custom fared similarly. Pulling filter back to 3 o’clock and trim to 10 o’clock delivered both meanness and nuanced two-pickup cluck with pickup volumes lowered a bit.

Even when I switched to fatter, more powerful pickups like P90s and humbuckers, I found myself keeping the push control at low to moderate settings, and volume relatively high — at noon-ish with ‘buckers, but mostly between 3 o’clock and max. Not because higher push settings sounded bad, but because the RCA circuit is the draw here, and higher push settings tended to sound less distinct.

Consequently, I’d then need to turn trim — the RCA calling card — way back too. To be sure, low trim and high push settings yield usable sounds. They’re just more akin to moderate-gain blues and classic-rock tones you can get from a number of other stompboxes.

Interestingly, I found myself using the push and filter controls much more with my LP Special and Cyclops. With slightly lower trim settings and filter set between 10 and 12 o’clock, both guitars sounded like they could cut tracks in a ’50s rock ’n’ roll or R&B session. That’s no small feat for the high-output, Univox Phase III-style humbuckers I’ve got in the Cyclops.

What’s more, higher-output guitars were the only test instruments that prompted me to nudge the push control up from minimum — never past noon, more often than not at 9 o’clock. This filled out, defined, and sweetened the way a studio mastering process might. And that’s the sort of magic the average dirt or fuzz box simply can’t conjure.

SPECIFICATIONS

CONTACT catalinbread.com

PRICE $179 street

CONTROLS Push, filter, volume, trim

EXTRAS LED Input and output, indicator, 9V-18V DC

DIMENSIONS 4.33” W: 2.36” H: 1.96” (LxWxH)

PRO Instills virtually any guitar type with vintage-recording je ne sais quoi. Also capable of fantastic gnarliness. Multitudes of lovely hues on tap … usually via moderate knob settings.

CON Unusual control setup requires more patient experimentation than you might expect. Sounds best through amps with pleasing tube breakup rather than lots of clean headroom. Moderate to high gain and trim settings can be off-putting.