Caroline Guitar Company Kilobyte Pedal - Kingston Gray

We’ve always wanted a truly macho delay pedal. One with manly delay repeats instead of the milquetoast whispers many manufacturers have called "echo." Caroline must have heard our prayers to the pedal goddesses and upped the ante by dropping Kilobyte, a truly inspirational delay with repeats up to 21 dB louder than the dry source signal. This sonic miracle is achieved by utilizing an analog overdrive/boost circuit feeding the digital echo path to make the echoes REALLY loud and clear, gritty and distorted, or ghostly and warm. Think all this electronic jiggery-pokery kills your dry tone? Turn the delay mix/level knob down and you'll hear how honestly your original signal has been preserved.

 

The PT-2399 delay chip is an interesting choice. Recommended for crappy Karaoke machines and kids toys, its horrible fidelity is surpassed only by its ability to distort. Caroline’s circuit exploits this perceived shortcoming by buffering the input signal and boosting the effect over said input signal. However, they didn’t stop molesting the innocent PT-2399 there. They pushed the delay time from the recommended max of 325ms to over 500ms, which doesn’t exactly let the chip relax. Which for all practical matters is a great sounding basis to build a gorgeously true bypass Lo-Fi delay pedal.

 

Jack DeVille, a designer out of Portland, Oregon, worked on the Mod control to give Kilobyte a touch of pitch shifting vibrato on the echo repeats for a hint of Magnatone warble. Also, to add a pinch of self-oscillating crazy-fun, a momentary switch sends the pedal into infinite feedback with additional high-pass filtering that slices through the mix like a plastic surgeon with a meth problem.

 

We chose Kilobyte because it’s just so damn cool! Who wouldn’t want a delay that boosts and distorts its echoes while keeping the original signal relatively pristine? We could see Kilobyte revolutionizing the Rockabilly/Psychobilly scene more than the discovery of a shipping container full of NOS pomade. The range of sounds are staggering— from Zombie Cliff Gallup scary to the clipped blues Dobro echoes of Chris Whitley’s Living With the Law, with a good dose of the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven Or Las Vegas ethereal shoe-gazing echo hipness for good measure.