Catalinbread Bicycle Delay
The Catalinbread Bicycle Delay is a physical manifestation of the experience of consciousness, letting go of the desire to control everything, experiencing the present, and maintaining a positive attitude in order to leave room for a positive experience.
The Bicycle Delay is as organic as a computer growing from a tree. Sonically the pedal is ever-changing, even turning the knobs has an amorphous behavior. Go with it.
The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on the set and setting. Approach each knob with an open mind. Listen to what the Bicycle Delay has to say.
The Bicycle Delay was something like an “Albert Hoffman moment” (to quote a good friend and guitarist Neal Casal).
I sat down with no plan of where I was going but to allow myself the freedom to be open to wherever the journey took me and just document the experience.
Really a strange path to travel when it involves something as cerebral as programming software. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe that’s a pure form of creativity, to use the boundaries of something so matter of fact as programming as a medium for art?
The result was a pedal as autobiographical as any I have been involved in. The Bicycle Delay is a physical manifestation of the experience of consciousness, letting go of the desire to control everything, and maintaining a positive attitude to leave room for a positive experience.
Controls
- Lucidity [Wet/Dry mix] Yin and Yang. There is a balance. The weight of each side is symbiotic and ever-changing.
- Reflect [number of repeats]. Envision a staircase. Reflect determines the number of steps in the staircase. Each step climbs or falls depending on MOOD.
- Radiance [REpeads Filter] Darkness or light. Dulled or sharpened. You can find opacity or clarity here.
- Mood. Determines direction and velocity of the repeat pitch shifts
- Expanse [Delay Time] Where is the focus? Inward, close at hand? Or gazing outward at a far away horizon in the mind’s eye? Somewhere in between? Your journey can be as short or as long as you care to make it. Take your time.
What does the designer say about the Bicycle Pedal
Bicycle Delay was something like an “Albert Hoffman moment” (to quote a good friend and guitarist Neal Casal).
I sat down with no plan of where I was going but allowed myself the freedom to be open to wherever the journey took me, and document the experience.
Really a strange path to travel when it involves something as cerebral as programming software. Or maybe it’s not.
Maybe that’s a pure form of creativity, to use the boundaries of programming as a medium for art? The result was a pedal as autobiographical as any I have been involved in.
The more time I spent with the Bicycle Delay the more it unfolded its complexities to me. The harder I thought about what it was doing, the more difficult it was to put my finger on it.
The more that I surrendered to what it was showing me, the more it set me free to be musically creative. In much the same way it took a computer to visualize a Mandelbrot Set, it took the Bicycle Delay for me to find the organic beauty in disharmony.
The way this pedal behaves is also metaphoric to how I’ve been looking at life. Approach it from a negative perspective, go ahead, and make it spiral downward.
There is beauty in it, like there is enjoyment in picking at a scab. It’ll take you to darker musical places fitting for the vampires at night. It all depends on your mood. Bring it up, it wants to take off. Happiness in a madhouse.
The most difficult and interesting stuff begins to happen when you keep it balanced. Edges of notes brighten radiantly to prominence like the flora and fauna do when I walk Clemma in the early morning sun.
POWERING UP THE BICYCLE DELAY
You can power your Bicycle Delay with any quality power supply designed for use with effects pedals. The output should be a negative tip DC from 9 to 18 volts. The Bicycle Delay does not run on batteries. If you want more volume, headroom, and percussive attack, try running an 18-volt power supply. A 9-volt power supply will have a slightly softer sound that saturates more easily.
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